Ologies with Alie Ward - Enigmatology (WORD PUZZLES) with David Kwong

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Crosswords! Puzzles! Wordles! Magic? Ah yes, world-renowned Enigmatologist David Kwong drops in to chat about the intersection of sleight of hand and brain games, covering everything from Scrabble strategies to how to get away with a surprise party unsuspected. Also: crosswords and dementia, how puzzles are like hot sauce, a secret group of Hollywood magicians, his most clever clues, cryptic crosswords, international slang, Wordle’s many derivatives, and how to get over your intimidation of all those empty squares. Follow David Kwong on Twitter and Instagram His websiteThe ENIGMAS playing card deck – with puzzles!A donation went to lollipoptheater.orgMore episode sources and linksMore episodes you may enjoy: Etymology (WORD ORIGINS), Mythology (STORYTELLING), Molecular Neurobiology (BRAIN CHEMICALS)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Mark David Christenson & Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's the banana peel in your purse because you can't find a trash can alleyward. And this is Allergies. This is a podcast about things. This week, crossword puzzles. Really? Crossword puzzles? There's an allergy for this? Hell yeah, there is.

So an enigmatologist is someone who studies and writes word or math or logic puzzles. And enigma comes from the Greek word for a dark saying or riddle or a tale. And enigmatology, it's a real discipline. It's a real thing. It was founded in 1974 by a guy named Will Shortz, who created his own major in puzzles at Indiana University. And that guy, Will Shortz, is now the head of the New York Times Crossword. And this guest has been a friend for years.

He's always been a friend who was cooler than me, smarter than me by a long shot, and capable of pulling acts of extreme evil with the gifts he has, but is actually a really solid dude. And he graduated from Harvard University, little place, named Harvard, where he did a thesis on magic and has written crosswords for the New York Times since 2006. And he also launched this interactive one-man show called The Enigmatist, which just had a run last year at the Geffen Playhouse in LA. And I caught the show and I've wanted to have him on for years, but we were both traveling and I was taking care of my dad this summer, so we just met up at his home in the winding

hills above Hollywood. And we posted it up in his living room. But before we get to the conversation, a quick thanks to everyone at Patreon. Hi. Thanks for supporting the show across a dollar or more a month. And you can submit questions. That is at patreon.com slash oligies. Merch is also available at oligiesmerch.com, including some brand new Spirit of Health

or Goblin Damned merch inspired by the Vampirology episodes. So get yourself some of that. And thanks to everyone who is subscribing and rating and reviewing. I read all the reviews, including this recent one by Kansas Just Got Gayer, who wrote, I've been listening to this every day while I clean houses for my job and I'm learning so much. I love it. It's making me consider switching up my major to do some ecology alongside animation. Who knows?

But anyway, thank you for the show. It truly takes my job from tedious to tantalizing. Thank you, Kansas Just Got Gayer. And also congrats to Kansas on having you there because you seem cool. Okay. On to the conversation with magician, puzzle maker, puzzle solver, speaker, performer, brainiac, friend and enigmatologist, David Kwong. I think I'll have you do to check your bike is if you can say I love that you have a Rubik's

Cube going already. I'm David Kwong. He him. I've known you for quite some time, years. And this episode. We met at the magic castle, right? We did meet at the magic castle. Holy shit.

I forgot. How hard is it to become a magician at the magic castle? It's quite prestigious. There are a lot of people that aspire to come to LA and perform there for a week and you have to audition your material. And then there are the magician members. And you do have to do a 15 minute or three trick routine to a committee to be accepted as a magician member.

Okay. So quick aside, the magic castle is a restaurant and a private club in the hills right above the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And it was built in 1909 and it has turrets and stained glass and a dress code involving sport coats. And you can only get in through a personal invite from a magician. And inside it's got red carpet and brass fixtures, dinner smells like gravy there. And there are magic shows happening in little theaters and corners all over the place.

It's truly surreal. And David has been an approved and esteemed member for 13 years. So yes, there is a semi-secret cabal of Hollywood magicians and he is one of them. Which came first for you, magic or puzzles? Magic came first. At least the home videos show me doing things when I was about six, seven years old. I think every kid has that phase thinking of magic trick set. And then puzzles came from my mother who is the history professor.

So there was this love for word games and scrabble. Triple word score. And then it wasn't until much later in life where I decided to fuse those two things together. So in 2010, I threw a 30th birthday for myself that tells you how old I am. And I threw a party at the magic castle and decided I wanted to do a trick for everybody. And I came up with this cross-repuzzle routine that has become my signature effect ever since. It's absolutely mind-blowing. I watched you perform this at the Geffen and I think about it often.

I still am like, how did he do it? So I saw his one-man show, The Enigmatist, last winter during its run at the Geffen. And it was the most intellectually engaging live show I've ever been to. Puzzles on puzzles on puzzles for the audience to solve. And it was thrilling to learn that I sucked so bad at them. But David has talked about puzzles and magic publicly before during his 2014 TED Talk. Puzzles and magic. I work in what most people think are two distinct fields, but I believe they are the same.

I am both a magician and a New York Times crossword puzzle constructor, which basically means I've taken the world's two nerdiest hobbies and combined them into one career. There's a great tradition of puzzles and magic overlapping. A lot of the books from the turn of the last century, the magic books have a puzzle section. And then there are famous magicians that Martin Gardner and the mathematicians, or mathematicians, if you will, that feature the overlap of numbers and probability and data and shuffling, playing cards. And there's a great tradition in it.

For me, it was more that the light bulb turned on that I could distinguish myself, differentiate myself from everybody else in the field by doing a different type of magic. Have you ever gotten drunk and accidentally told someone how some works? Not really. It depends. It depends what it is. I'll say this, my approach to magic is already one that's fairly transparent. The show that you saw at the Geffen, The Enigmatists, starts with me revealing how a trick works. I put up on the screen the Saw, A Lady and Half trick from 1921.

And I'm not out to ruin anyone's magic show, but I enjoy describing the principles of illusion to people and putting forth that it's all tricks, it's all misdirection, and it's a puzzle for you to figure out. And I don't pretend to have superpowers. And I think that is what makes me a little bit different than most magicians, that on some level are pretending to channel the powers from beyond. But there's a small sect of magicians that acknowledge right up front that it's all tricks. Penn and Taylor famously, for decades, have been doing that.

So you didn't read my mind just that. No, there's no such thing. It's absolutely lies. We did a trick. A trick. An absolute trick. So it is a trick. All that stuff is tricks. And you get some real mechanics and practitioners of sleight of hand who also say,

none of this is real, I'm just a step ahead of you. And that can be very entertaining. When it comes to making crossword puzzles, obviously you must have been very good at it. You did it from a young age, I imagine. Who writes these? How many people are writing crossword puzzles versus who's doing them? I feel like I didn't even think about crossword puzzles being written by someone until I met you. I sort of just figured they were just birthed from a stone somewhere.

How did you start? OK, well, my love for word games and competitive scrabble, and it's no surprise that I found crossword construction known as cruciverbalism. Or a cruciverbalist is one who constructs crosswords. So cru-sa meaning cross, like crucifix and verbal meaning word. I like that. I started just after college, so I've been doing it about 20 years. I had a friend, Kevin Choset, who showed me the ropes and we've collaborated on a number of puzzles.

The New York Times and most other publications are freelance. Anyone can mail one in. And if you're listening to this and you're encouraged to do so, reach out and I'm happy to give you a few tips. It's gotten much more competitive now that in the pandemic it exploded. Yeah. So the New York Times, it used to be like you would have to wait six months to hear back. They may still say that, but I just know that they're getting dozens and dozens a day. And yeah, we're in a golden age of puzzles.

There are a lot of independent crossword resources now, crossword publications. The New Yorker has one. I think New York Magazine has one. The browser, they're all over the place. A lot of indie blogs feature them. So a lot of places to submit your puzzles. But what do you think of the word enigmatology from an etymological standpoint? That sentence was very hard to say.

Thank you. Enigmatology from an etymological... Enigmatology was coined, I believe, by Wil Shorts, or at least he made it famous because he went to college at Indiana University and created this major for himself. So we all bow to the great puzzle guru, Wil Shorts. He's a lovely guy. He's been a friend and a mentor for years. And enigmatology is the study of puzzles. I took a page out of that book and I combined enigma and enigmatology with an IST type of word, like a hypnotist, an illusionist, a mentalist, and I came up with the enigmatist.

It's perfect. I mean, also, I love that someone who constructs crossword puzzles can just make up words if they want. That's one thing I've learned here. We made up cruciverbalists and it's in some dictionaries, but not all. There's no rules if you're writing them, or maybe you're just solving them, or maybe you're intimidated by them. Do you ever look into the neuroscience of puzzles and magic and why our brains want to solve things? Sure. What I consider often is that we are wired to solve problems.

And I think that the first people had to figure out how to get their food. And if you go left, you'll avoid the saber-toothed tiger. And if you go right, you'll be able to cross the river by knocking a tree over and using it as a bridge. These puzzles, we figure things out to survive. So I think it goes back to the beginning of time. And it helps us make order out of chaos. Another way to look at recreational puzzles is that I'm not sure if I entirely agree with it, but I'll say it anyway. I've heard some people put forth that puzzles are kind of like pain, like you are subjecting your brain to this challenge.

And it's stressful and you work at it and you work at it and you work at it. And finally, you solve it. You have that enormous release, this aha moment of, I triumphed. I figured it out. And there's a basic human need to overcome adversity like that. For some light reading on this, you can crack open the Journal of Human Brain Mappings August 2018 edition for the study titled, Ultra High Field fMRI Insights on Insight. Neural correlates of the aha moment, which took a bunch of German volunteers willing to get stuffed into a functional MRI machine while doing word puzzles.

And they were given simple tasks, try to figure out what word connects three other words, like house, bark, and apple. What's the common word? Hold on. Tree, tree house, tree bark, apple tree. So when the volunteers figured it out, they were to press a button and then the fMRI was like a brain paparazzi flashing, going off, seeing what's happening. And the researchers found that no matter the level of difficulty, that solving the puzzle caused robust subcortical activity changes in the bilateral thalamus hippocampus and the dopinomergenic midbrain comprising ventral, the tagamental area, nucleus accumbens, and caudate nucleus. What the fuck does that mean?

It means your brain gets tickled and then you release dopamine and it feels so nice. So yes, we like overcoming adversity, especially in a way that is low stakes. You know, it's not like I'm trying to jump between buildings. I'm like, figured out the word all, a triumph a day is all I need. Maybe when it starts with a crossword puzzle, and I'm going to admit that I fucking suck at crossword puzzles. And it's one of those things that I don't know why I'm bad at it. I like banana grams. I like wordle.

I suck at Scrabble, but I have so much trivia and facts in my mind. But when it comes to crossword puzzles, I just stare blankly at them. And I don't know why and I'm ashamed of it. No, don't be ashamed of it. Why are you so good at it? Where how do you get good? First of all, start with Monday. That's the easiest day of the week.

Easiest day of the week. Everyone can do a Monday puzzle. Everyone in air quotes, I'm going to say. Okay. The New York Times, it gets harder throughout the week. Monday through Thursday are themed puzzles. Thursday is when it gets really tricky. Things are upside down in multiple letters in a square and it gets really devious.

Friday and Saturday are themeless, big open grids. They're much harder. And Sunday goes back to being a themed puzzle. It's sort of an extra big Thursday. But start with Monday. Everybody can do it. And don't be so hard on yourself because the crossword constructors goal is to fool you to some extent, is to hold back the reveal as long as possible.

So that when you get to it, you have this aha moment. And again, you have this like explosion of, oh my God, I'm smart. I figured it out. And this is why I think there's so much in common between puzzles and magic because a good puzzle misdirects you and you think something else is going on and there's a twist to it and then finally you figure it out. And the clues are meant to be deceptive as well. They purposely use word play to mess with your brain.

And you get better at them when you see those patterns, when you start to expect that. So every time I see the word hero, I'm immediately thinking, this is probably about a sub sandwich and not, you know, superman. Every time I had just learned this over time, you know, when I see cream, for example, I immediately know the answer is trio. Eric Clapton's group was cream. Oh my God. Right.

It has nothing to do with what you put in your coffee. So there's these quick little triggers where I remember it's pattern recognition. And the people that win the crossword tournaments every year for speed, right? The American crossword puzzle tournament and a handful of others. The people that win those are usually math and music people. Really? It's not a verbal thing. You are writing down letters, but it's data driven.

It is recall. It's pattern recognition. What kind of patterns are in there? Well, I think it's not so much a visual pattern. If you see a S and a V, then you're already thinking Sven or Svelte or, you know, right, it's quick recall from the clues. And it's not being misdirected by that first layer that's meant to deceive you. It's cutting through that and it's knowing exactly what they're getting to.

When you're at a gathering or a cocktail party or something and it comes up that you write crossword puzzles, do you instantly have a rapport with someone if they're like, I do it every day? Yeah, it happens all the time and more often than not. It's my grandmother does it every single day in pen. She does no pencil aloud. And I, you know, I say, respect, you know, that's an OG solver. Do you use a pencil or a pen?

I pretty much all computer now just for ease, though, for variety puzzles, cryptic puzzles and things from Puzzle Hunts, which we can talk about in a second. I am now using my iPad and the digital pencil because there's a lot to keep track of and you're using various colors and things are hidden all over the place. And what is a cryptic puzzle? So a cryptic crossword is it's the British dial. And I think it's the most sophisticated word puzzle out there. And it consists of every clue consists of diabolical word play.

The word play, the hint that unlocks the answer is right in front of you hidden within that sentence. So cryptic crosswords, news to me, I'd never even heard of them. And they're more popular in the UK where they originated. But typically the answer is hidden in the clue. Like one example I found in a Guardian article, the clue is cooking equipment taken back from Eris, I tormented. So taken back from indicates it's backwards and hidden in the words

Eris, I tormented backwards is the word rotisserie. What? I kept looking for cryptic crossword examples. I even resorted to getting ass deep in the Wikipedia page for cryptic crosswords. And I just have to share this one clue example. OK, so the clue is very sad, unfinished story about rising smoke. What's the answer? Fuckify now. But very sad, unfinished story about rising smoke is broken down. Leslie, you ready for this?

Very sad is the definition. Unfinished story gives TAL, which is the word tail with one letter missing because it's unfinished, rising smoke gives the word tragic because cigar is a smoke. And this is a down clue. So rising indicates that cigar should be written backwards, tragic. About in the clue means that the letters of TAL, the unfinished story, should be put on either side of RADGIC, giving the answer,

TRAGICAL. So very sad, unfinished story about rising smoke gives you TRAGICAL. And I'm like, I have enough problems in my life. I don't need cryptic crosswords, but some people love them. David later emailed me a cryptic crossword clue example, saying, oligies host from a wild, wild area. And after a few minutes, I experienced robust subcortical activity changes in the bilateral thalamus, hippocampus and the dopamrogenic midbrain because the first wild indicates

it'll be an anagram because it's wild and a wild area is an anagram for alleyward. So cryptics, the Russian nesting dolls of puzzles. But there's its anagrams, its words hidden between other words, its words going backward. The New York Times runs one about a month now. And then there are brilliant, brilliant puzzle makers that are members of the National Puzzlers League.

And I think Mark Halpin is my favorite puzzle designer. He makes those beautiful puzzles. This past Labor Day, I just solved his annual Labor Day puzzle hunt. It's like a holiday for me. I do it with my friend, Craig Maison, the screenwriter and producer. And we block out the world and spend the entire long weekend solving his puzzle hunt. And what a puzzle hunt is, is it's many puzzles, 10 puzzles, say, where every single answer is then funneled into the final puzzle,

which is the meta puzzle to reveal the final ultimate answer. So Mark Halpin, just a side note, has a ton of puzzles on his website and what he's also an accomplished stage designer and an associate professor of stage design at the University of Cincinnati. Mark, pick a lane. Be excellent at one thing only, please. Leave some accomplishments for the rest of us. OK, have dare.

But yes, he makes extraordinarily complex and really challenging puzzles within puzzles, within puzzles. And do you feel like those meta puzzles is mega, these cryptic ones, these very hard ones? Do you feel like simpler ones like Wordle have been a gateway for people in the last couple of years? Absolutely. Gateway is the right term for it.

I always say that the mini crossword for the New York Times is the gateway drug to the big one, and it's very successful. And these things that just take a couple of minutes are putting puzzles in the hands of millions of people. I do Wordle every morning. You do. I was wondering what you thought of it because it's so simple compared to other puzzles, but is there something in that simplicity

that you just can do it while you are putting in your contact lenses or whatever? While I'm on the toilet. Yeah, it's it's it's brilliant. Josh Wardle, who created Wordle, he took an he took an old format, Mastermind, and there's a few other board games, but he he made it so clean and simple and digestible and the social sharing of it is really what caused it to spread like wildfire. OK, so real quick, in case you don't know this origin story of Wordle,

a software engineer named Jason Wardle created this game because his partner loves word games. And on November 1st, 2021, there were 90 daily users. By Christmas, there were 300,000. And by the end of January 2022, 10 million people were playing daily. So Wardle sold Wordle that month in January. He's like, I'm out. I don't want to manage this for a few million bucks to the New York Times.

And we all play it every day still on my family text thread. And your pod gram, Fancy Nancy, has excelled for years at Words with Friends. And naturally, she kicks our asses at Wordle. Do you do the same opening one every time? Or do you just think of a five letter word that comes in your head? I change it because I get bored. Yeah. A lot of people like audio. Audio. I've never tried that.

I've tried twal, rogue is a good one. Get those vowels out. Audio. S-O-A-R-E, sore or soiree is like a type of hawk or something, a bird. I don't really know, but it works. S-O-A-R-E, a lot of people like raise. Oh, raise is a good one. So a sore means a young hawk or a falcon, which is great if you're just a fledgling wordler.

And I think you're right that the social aspect is part of puzzles and being in a cafe and seeing someone doing the same crossword puzzle that you might be doing. That sort of shared misery and delight. Yeah. What about Scrabble? How ruthless are you? Do you win by just hundreds of points? No, I'm pretty good.

And I can beat the average player, but at a tournament, I would get destroyed. Because it comes down to what you've memorized and how much of the dictionary you know, and they know all of it. And that's a talk about a real pattern recognition game. I know my two letter words, my threes, I think most of the fours. You got to know your vowel dumps, your words that have a Q but no U. I know a lot of those. According to ScrabbleWordFinder.org, there are 47 acceptable Scrabble words that

have a Q but no U, and a few of them are Qi, Qi, like the Chinese energy for 11 points. There's Quat, a leaf that's chewed as a stimulant or made into tea. And there's Qin, Q-I-N, the Chinese dynasty that built a great wall. And in Scrabble, there are also these things called bingo words. And when you use all seven of your letters, you get a 50 point bonus reward. And there's this one nationally ranked Scrabble champion named Mark Abadi, who recommends looking for prefix and suffix letters like un or pre or adding est or ing to shorter words like bingoing, for example, which is eight letters.

But you get the point. So yes, some is strategy and skill and some is just memorizing lists and learning to Scrabble as a verb, to speak and Scrabble. For those of you that want to play Scrabble, learn those 100 or maybe it's up to 104, two letter words and you will double your score. What are some of them? Well, it starts with A-A-A-A, which is rough, cindery, lava, and goes all the way down to Z-A-Zah, which is pizza,

which ruined the game of Scrabble. How is that even a collaboration? Brooklyn said, I'm going to go get some Zah and if he came with me. I feel like four people on Twitter said it in 2013 or something, you know? I am incorrect. The word Zah is a form of casual truncation known as clipped slang. And Zah has been around since the late 1960s. So this one's on the boomers.

But it's had Scrabble's official approval since 2006. I mean, how often are they having to change the Scrabble dictionary to be like, fine? I think it's every four years or so. They come out with a, it's always a big holiday when they when they announce the new words. Can I ask you questions from listeners? Yeah.

OK. They, I just want to get into it because they had great ones. OK. Some very specific and some wanting strategies. But before we solve your puzzling queries, let's first send some cash money to a cause of David's choice. And David told me that he frequently performs magic for children's hospitals via this great program called Lollipop Theater. It's a 501 C3 organization that brings movies to pediatric boards, as well as a music program, entertainment themed arts and crafts activities.

And of course, magicians, if David is around. So to learn more about them, you can go to lollipoptheater.org, which is linked in the show notes. And that donation was magically made possible by sponsors of the show. OK, let's get a clue and answer some questions. OK, I thought this was a great question. Someone whose name is Miss Palindrome and Stephanie Lesky, they wanted to know those games where the first word that jumps out with you

is the word that is supposed to tell you something about your psyche. Are those accurate? You know, when you look at like a word search and then suddenly you're like, oh, those are the three words I noticed? I don't think they're accurate. But you're also talking to a magician who is a magicians are the great skeptics. So we kind of know how all the tricks work, which is why we don't believe in psychics and fortune tellers.

If that works for you, go for it. People get a lot of answers in peace out of consulting things like that. But for me, I'm aware of the tricks. I know there are words that are positioned strategically so that you choose them. I'll just say this. I'm always looking for a word that they did not mean to hide in there. Like, what can I find on the diagonal? Oh, I guess the word panda is.

So a curse research will deliver word puzzles that promise to predict your whole year or your weekend or your personality. I even your hair type based on the first three words you'll see. So I am about to have a voluminous, luscious and full weekend with my hair looking hopeful and strong and genius. I took a lot of those word search tests. And I figured people were playing word search games on like Roman tablets. But nope, they emerged around the same time as the word saw around the 1960s.

And the inventor of word searches is kind of a point of disagreement among historians. And one guy had his puzzles ripped off by a publisher he submitted to. But others think that word searches originated from the Spanish enigmatologist Pedro Oconde Oro, who called them sopas de letras or soup of letters. But did the soup have any eggs? Shelby Reardon, Zed Sherogane, Kevin Wilson, all use the term Easter eggs. They wanted to know, are there ever hidden Easter eggs in crosswords? You ever sneak things in there like a little nod to your family or friends just for you?

Like a Wilhelm scream, but in puzzles? I try to put family members' names in all the time. But the carnal rule is that the puzzle has to operate as normal. So it might just be like my mother's name is Joan. So if I have a chance to put Joan of Arc in a clue or my dad's name is Thai, T-A-I, so it might be my tie or something. But you can't mess with something that millions of people are going to solve. Right.

Now, that said, I am in cahoots with little shorts and Will has let me hide things in the puzzle for my own purposes. My TED Talk, if you're interested, that really changed my career. That was timed with the New York Times crossword. So when I finished the TED Talk, I say, ladies and gentlemen, we have today's New York Times. Many of you in the first couple of rows have it underneath your seats as well. Really dig, we hid them under there.

See if you can fish out the newspaper and open up to the arts section. And you will find the crossword puzzle. And if you open it up, you'll see there's a hidden message in it. Now, that hidden message echoed what I was doing on stage. But Will made it very clear to me, this has to be a normal Wednesday puzzle. So this is a bonus thing of people find it. You got married three months ago.

Did you? Nope. Nope. You didn't obviously didn't propose with a puzzle. Did you try to hide anything? I didn't do it. No, I kept the magic in the puzzles out of it. I've helped a lot of people propose with puzzles

and I've and I've used magic tricks to help people propose. But I just I separated work from personal life. I wonder if she would have been expecting that. Does she do puzzles at all? Well, I do have to throw her off the scent all the time. OK. My wife is very clever and she's on to me. So I am using every bit of misdirection I can to make it so she doesn't see things

coming. Nice. I guess I bet you'd throw the best surprise party. When I proposed, I threw a surprise engagement party and yeah, it was all set up. She didn't see it coming. It's great. It's all the misdirection. It's the excuse to get you somewhere else that is what it all hinges on. Right.

So misdirection, I'll give you a fun little technical tidbit. There's a great Dutch magician named Tommy Wander. Real name. Yeah. His actual name, Jacobus Maria Behmelman. Nice. Nice. Nice. And he said that misdirection is the art of giving people something of greater interest to pay attention to. Right. So like bad misdirection in a magic show is I want you to look somewhere else.

So somebody comes out on the stage with a platter full of cookware and they drop it on the ground and it clangs and everybody looks over and that breaks the moment. And everybody knows that you were trying to distract them. Right. But if you can bake the misdirection into your routine, so if I want to steal something from my pocket, I'm going to reach up with my hand and pull a coin out of the air, a shiny coin. Everyone's going to look up at that and enjoy that moment. And my other hand is going for my pocket.

So you're giving people something else to enjoy while you sneak the next thing. So I guess when it comes to like a surprise party, give your partner another reason to get excited about something else. Yeah. You know, instead of being like, oh, we got to pick up the car from the shop. We got to go pick up a bunch of dishware that I dropped in a parking lot. That's great advice. OK, a lot of people had questions.

Sure, I will list them in an aside. Looking at your brains, Elijah, Francis Quinlan, Eli Jonathan, Ruby Bray, Winnie's a witch, Brandon J. Willis, Olga, Sam Moody, Becky, the Sassy Seagrass scientist, Gracie Zarene, Allison Masing, Leschatz, Grimans, Will Kingen, Kylie M. Smith, Dantween, Alina Horne, Lonnie Bauer and first time question askers M and Taylor Clinton, all of whom wanted to know about brain health in Pavka 34, first time question askers words are puzzle games used to help people with dementia?

And Eli Jonathan wants to know, do word games actually help preserve or improve cognitive abilities? I don't have a scientific answer, but I think the studies are pretty clear that it works. And I could tell you that my my father just retired and he immediately started doing logic puzzles and he does them all the time. And I think it does keep the neurons firing. OK, so I looked into this and several studies show

that doing daily puzzles can keep your melon sharp. And in 2014, there was a paper published called Association of Crossword Puzzle Participation with Memory Decline in Persons Who Developed Dementia, and it found that late life crossword puzzle participation was associated with delayed onset of memory decline in people who developed dementia. And then there was a 2019 study in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, and that reported that the frequency of word puzzle use

is directly related to cognitive function in adults over the age of 50. But these studies tend to be observational, so they can't determine the cause and effect. Can the crosswords stave off dementia? Neuroscientists think it might just be that daily puzzles keep you sharper overall. So if you do develop dementia, you'll be starting from kind of a higher cognitive baseline and the effects of dementia wouldn't be noticed for, on average, two and a half years, according to the Bronx 20 year longitudinal aging study.

So puzzles come for the dopamine. Stay for the tenuous grasp on reality and all that you've ever known or love. Matt Thompson asked, what are some lesser known word puzzles that we should be doing? Well, I have to go back again and recommend the cryptic crossword, but they are very tough and very fun and very clever. And a good puzzle makes you feel smart, right? That's that's like the mantra that comes

from Will Short and trickles on down to all of us is it should be an enjoyable experience. And when you crack a good cryptic crossword, you feel really smart about yourself and you also simultaneously respect the person who like came up with a clever ruse that you just overcame. So cryptic crosswords are great. We talked about wordle, but if you want more of a challenge, there's chordal and octordal and there's even 64 which is 64 wordles at the same time. And every morning I wake up and I

guess one word in the 64 wordle to try to hit it, because I've never gotten a perfect score on that. And one day I'm going to. So first time question, asker Hanna Boyd, who wanted to know his favorite alternate version of wordle. Let's direct our attention to the landing page of 64tl.au, which says Six Agenta Quattu Ordle, a monstrosity perpetrated by Catherine Cowey based on Cedric Ordle by Brad

Bednar, based on Octordal by Kenneth Crawford, based on Quordal by Freddie Meyer, based on Dordle by Guillermo S. Toes, based on wordle by Josh Wardle. So I hopped on there and I tried solving all 64 wordles at once. And after five minutes, I experienced a kind of brain vertigo that made me physically nauseated and my throat was swelling with cortisol. So the tagline of this giant daily free word puzzle is, quote, play as much as you dare.

Every Six Agenta Quattu Ordle is a nightmare. But maybe in an increasingly boiling planet with an ongoing pandemic and just the start of the next presidential campaigns, a playtime nightmare is preferable. Do you stay off social media in a healthy way because you're doing puzzles? No, everything's a juggling act. OK, yeah, I'm on there just like everybody else. I was going to say, it's probably so much better for you to be doing a Quordal than it is just to be like, oh, like there's a great puzzle community online.

So. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah. Yeah. The spelling bee. Sorry, the spelling bee. I can't believe this slipped my mind. The spelling bee I do every day with my mother on the phone. We started it in the pandemic. It's the loveliest tradition.

It's another New York Times word game. And it's great. You have seven letters and you have to use the middle one and make as many words as you possibly can, and it's awesome. No, that is not an anagram, though, right? Yeah, they are anagram. Well, a pangram, pan, meaning all, uses all the letters, right? So there are sometimes several pangrams,

which means those are all anagrams of each other. But anagram is just mixing up letters, yeah. Because some people, Paul Srelio, Miranda Panda, Fuzz Goddess, Davis Bourne, Sarah Matthew, Anna Thompson, all had questions about why is it like in Sarah's words, why is it that some people like filling empty space like wordle or crosswords while others like moving letters around like word scrambles, they are an empty space filler themselves. But yeah, is it a different part of the brain that fills things in versus unscrambles?

Wow, good question. Right. It's a similar muscle, but when you're filling in the blank spaces, you are using logic in a different way to know what what your possibilities are, right? And with every letter, it narrows the possibilities down. And you're you're drawing on your database of words and know what can still fit in there. Whereas when you have all the letters in front of you, it's a little more of a physical exercise of moving things around and recognizing the patterns that are

right in front of you. I like doing both. Yeah, I feel like I have to really let my mind be more flexible and elastic. Because sometimes if I see a word scramble and it starts with a T-H, all I can think of is T-H words. And I have to force myself to split the T and the H or you know what I mean? And you're like, I can only see it as this one thing. Like my brain gets stuck in that loop, you know? Well, there's a new word game that came out of fun little thing you can do every

morning that Adam Wagner made. It's called anagrams. OK. And it's animal. Oh, stop. Animal grams. Sort of. I mean, these these are the levels you can get to. Al giraffe, dolphin. I already love it. Parrot, octopus, all the way to the goat and you try to get to the goat. So basically you have these letters and you have to make words out of them.

Oh, OK. This one is just a difficult delight and it has nothing really to do with animals. Don't let that throw you. It's just spelled anagram, A-N-I-G-R-A-M with an I. And the levels go up to goat or greatest of all time. And it starts with a four letter word scramble and then it adds a letter each level until you've got nine letters to work with. And the emojis of cute animals are just kind of a visual bonus.

So that is anagrams.us. I like this game already. This is a new one. Yeah, I think you put it out a month ago, a couple months ago. Do you feel like since wordles? Yes. Yeah, people are like it's exploded. These daily games have exploded. There's really all sorts of spinoffs.

A lot of them are play plays on the word wordle. So you have hurdle where you're listening to things and you have world all where you're looking at the world and trying to recognize countries. I think there's a movie recognition one that people are into now. Movie scenes, they just give you like a still and you have a number of guesses to figure out what movie it is. This is called Framed.WTF and I played one round and based on pictures of a jungle and a guy in a cape and some ogres and a sword, I guessed Lord of the Rings

and then Eternals, Avatar and then, I don't know, I just typed in the word winter with a question mark and finally I gave up and I was just trying to burn through my guesses and I just put in like Magic Mike. It was the fantasy movie Warcraft. So my bad, Framed.WTF indeed. Do you think that people are doing it out of a sense of play or out of a sense of, oh, maybe I can have the next big hit? Um, making them.

Both. Both. I mean, 64-dolls, 64-dolls is not trying to be the next big hit and that's just that's a very good point. Yeah. Um, Kate Munker wants to know, OK, David, so you might create the Sunday crossword, but can you do them yourself? Oh, yeah, I can solve them. I'm not the fastest.

I would say the Sunday New York Times puzzle takes me about 12 to 15 minutes. That's it? The world's best are doing it in seven, maybe? Oh, gosh, people were posting this this Monday past Monday puzzle was all like Hollywood references. It was like Shonda Rhimes was the things that rhymed with Shonda like Honda. And I saw people on Twitter posting times that were under two minutes on the computer, presumably, but like, you know,

a minute 30 Monday puzzle can blaze right through it. People who suck at crosswords. People who are scared of crosswords. I am your people. And I did this week's Monday puzzle and I finished a whole crossword. It took me 25 minutes, 25 minutes. OK, some people get it in like two minutes. But let me tell you that when I finally got that Caesar dressing with a question

mark was a clue for the word Toga, I was like, you all got me. That was a good one. Monday crosswords are designed for children, marine mammals, or maybe Martians who landed just a few months ago, or me. And I loved it. Felix Wolf wanted to know who decides what are easy, medium and hard clues. It starts with a constructor in that when you think of a theme, you kind of envision what day it might be on.

So if there's multiple letters in a square, it's certainly going on a Thursday or Sunday. If you're doing a very easy bit of word play, it's probably a Monday puzzle and you write the clues accordingly. But the clues are changeable and the editing staff at the times will change the clues to calibrate the puzzle and maybe make it a Tuesday instead of a Monday. Oh, and then also they're changing clues because they want to avoid what might have just been used because the words repeat all the time. So if Oreo was in the puzzle all the time,

it was in the day before and it was clued as black and white cookie, the next day it's going to be like double stuff. Petaluck says, I heard the puzzles that appear in newspapers are easier to do later in the day because people use solutions from the puzzle more in their chit chat during the day. Is there something to that? Do words get implanted in us subconsciously? Yeah, I mean, I hear that point that people are talking about things around the water cooler and you hear some answer that it's going to be in your subconscious

and you can put it in the puzzle. I think more on that line of thinking is this idea of tip of the tongue memory. And that is when you're trying to think of something and you can't recall it and you can't recall it and then it just pops into your head an hour later. That's tip of the tongue memory and that's a very real thing. And your brain is working to solve problems like that and crosswords, even when you're not thinking about it. So is that why if you put something away and you come back to it, you might have?

Yes. Does that help with your work-life balance, knowing that like, let's say you're stuck on a problem or something that you could go and go to the beach or go to a petting zoo or something and come back and be better at it? Well, certainly for puzzle construction, something will just pop into my head and it will, I was searching for some word or some pattern that I could use to get out of some corner of a puzzle that I was stuck in and it'll just pop in. So it helps constructors as well.

Patrons, Justice Bears, Christa Jones, Marin Prophet and Shelby Mills wanted to know about sources for inspiration. And if he starts with the solutions or the clues, how does he do it? Do you have something on your notes app or some sort of tiny notepad that you write ideas as they come through? Yeah, yeah, I have, let's see, my computer's open. So like, puzzle and crossword ideas, yeah, like. They're in a spreadsheet?

How did I expect anything less? Oh, my gosh, this feels like espionage. So first of all, don't use any of these, by the way, listeners, but no, you can't, whatever. Like, look at Kumail Nanjiani. That's got to be in a puzzle. Yes. Come on, those letters are insane.

Absolutely. You may know Kumail Nanjiani from The Big Sick or Eternals or Chippendales. Great actor, wonderful dude. And I'm absolutely bragging when I say that he has been to my birthday party. So I've known Kumail for probably a decade socially. And back when he hosted the Meltdown, this comedy show in the back of a comic bookstore on Sunset Boulevard, I remember Kumail telling the story about how his last name was slang for a cooch.

And I was like, what is that story? Well, folks use something called rhyming slang. For example, why call the steps stairs when you can call them apples and pears with more syllables and no relation to stairs? A joke might make you bubble bath rather than laugh. And if you're in between paychecks, you're not broke. According to UK slang, you're coals and coke. Satin and silk means milk and rats and mice are a paradise.

I'm like, what is this slang? I had no idea anything about rhyming slang. So back to Glasgow. Kumail Nanjiani happens to have a second cousin who is an esteemed Scottish broadcast journalist. And in the local brogue, Shereen Nanjiani rhymes ever so slightly with a word fanny, which is your front bud. So a Shereen Nanjiani means a baby maker there.

So different parts of the world have all kinds of linguistic angles on that note. Joe Portofito wanted to know how much consideration is given to the diversity of the puzzle solvers. Some people would be more familiar with certain words than others. For example, we're in a revolution right now. Yeah. The crossword just like everywhere else has really tried to become more diverse and they've done a great job over the New York Times. You're seeing fewer and fewer puzzles that are just themed on

like, you know, oldies songs from the 1960s, right? And then cluing can be adjusted. So again, instead of referencing just, you know, white people from the 1950s, they've just done a great job over there, right? And then they're trying to really democratize the submissions process. So it's not just constructors of old, but anyone can go through the portal now and submit a crossword and you're seeing people from all walks of life submit crosswords and that leads to more diverse content as well.

So, you know, hats off to the New York Times. They've done a great job with that. It kind of dovetails to Genevieve Jellybean, who committed assault by asking, why are they all geared toward old people? Sincerely, a 25 year old who likes old people games except for the 80s trivia parts. He said, perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places, but the crosswords often always contain pop culture trivia from the 80s, which is an automatic no, because I wasn't alive then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you trivia from the 80s.

I'm like, I hear you. I get it. It's changing. It's the and the crossword audience is getting younger and broader. And I think the New York Times is hitting a wide demographic. So there's a mix of stuff. But if you go to the indie crosswords, they're skew much younger. There should be crosswords for what year you were born, because I know that if I tried to do a Gen Z crossword, I would not get it.

But then again, there were probably the cream trio is not something I would get. You should just cure it like a cream. Yeah, that's that was a reference of a band from a white band from 60s. So where does the youth of today go to crossword? David likes Rex Parker's blog. He trusts the links there. There's also crossword fiend and AVX words, which builds itself as crosswords for the not faint of heart.

And I'm starting to realize that word puzzles have kind of the same vibe as hot sauce, like a variety of pain levels that people can find invigorating and use as a badge of survival. And then for others, they're just a horror show to be avoided at all costs. Hot sauce people are just hot sauce people. Why did they make those sauces so hot? Do all of the enigmatologists, they all kind of know each other. It's a very small community.

Yeah. Are you guys like on a WhatsApp thread that's like, hey, guys. I'll be ripping each other's puzzles apart. No, that's not fair. It's actually a very supportive community. Well, on that note, Hannah Nolan said in the New York Times puzzle this week, one of the answers was shade tree. However, the entire word shade was in one square.

How? Why? I missed that one, but shade like you just shade in the square as a black thing. That was probably the as a black square. I don't know. I mean, however, the entire word shade. Oh, I remember, I remember. It was, yes, that was in the lower right hand corner. What's what's the question?

How? Why is that allowed? Yes, how? How? Why? It's allowed when there is a consistent rule to explain what's going on. OK, you can't just throw a curveball in there. But if the whole puzzle has one consistent tricky rule in it, then it's up to the solver to figure that out and unlock that and have that aha

moment and hopefully you feel smart when you figure it out. That was a very weird little corner. I remember kind of raising an eyebrow when I saw that. I don't think it was my favorite, but, you know, look, constructors are always trying to push the envelope a little bit. I just feels like we got one rule here and it's one letter per box is what I thought. You can do multiple words in a box. That to me, that's called a rebus, R-E-B-U-S.

Oh, someone asked about a rebus. So I here, I'll show you some of the rebus puzzles I've made. Shall we? Yeah, I'm learning new vocabulary. Has rebus ever been a clue in a puzzle? Do you know what I mean? A clue? Like just the word rebus is the answer.

The answer? Yeah, sure. Let's see. Ready? I'm on the database. You can scour past puzzles at the website, exportinfo.com, which I will link for you, my nerds, a rebus of a rebus. Rebus has been in 25 times. Oh, my God. Since Will Schwartz took over database.

It was clued most recently on July 2nd, 2022 as image problem question mark. OK, like an image puzzle, image question. Yeah. See, I would see image problem and I would instantly be like a publicist branding. The question mark is what tells you that's the that's the nomenclature for there's some word play going on here. Really? Yeah. I didn't realize that that was the tip of the hat.

Speaking of tips, patrons, Audrey Lloyd, Becca Christensen, Melissa Burger, Jesse Dragon, first time askers, Becca Van Tassel and Carolyn Cullen wanted to know in Carolyn's words, what are some tips, tricks and strategies for tackling a crossword? Are there any other things like that? That are once you do puzzles a lot, you'll go, oh, OK. When they yes, if there's an abbreviation in the clue, there's an abbreviation in the answer.

OK, if there's a first name in the clue, they're usually going for a first name in the answer. So if it was, let's see, what's a good movie to reference? I keep thinking of of volcano movies. How about Jurassic World? OK, Jurassic World. So that was Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. Right. So if it if the answer were Bryce,

it would be Chris's co-star in Jurassic World. Oh, but if it were Pratt's co-star, it might be Howard. Yeah. Oh, it's a little tricky there because she's Dallas Howard. But OK, that's a good point. That's a good point. OK, that's super helpful. Got my rigidity. I'm just like, no, no, that's helpful. That's helpful. This is helpful.

Yeah, Callista Donahue wants to know, are there any clues that you're particularly proud of where you're like, those are those a good one? I can tell you puzzles I'm proud of is probably the easiest way to do that. OK, so I made a Sunday puzzle with my friend, Kevin, that was a Mad Magazine Fold-in, so you would. Oh, my God, the page on the dotted line. So the right side linked up with the left.

And there were words that ran across that that that took a couple of years to make. Oh, my God. This one was co-written with Kevin Chauset, New York Times, Sunday, January 24th, 2010, should you dare attempt it? This one I just called up here. We were talking about Rebuses and this one is grid art. This this is made to look like a panda in the Black Square. Oh, my God.

And then running across the middle there is Panda. But as you solve the puzzle, you start to realize that that parses as P and A. And there are P and A squares around the puzzle. Oh, my Lord. So that there's a lot of Rebuses in that. Yeah, there's probably a dozen. Wow, I know what a Rebus is now. But you can see that it's all cohesive, right?

It says popular zoo attraction or a hint to 11 squares in this puzzle. Oh, my gosh, Panda. How long did it take you to work on that? Oh, I probably spent a week on that. I don't know when you get really into it and you feel in the groove and you unplug everything and just work on that. Yeah, it probably took a week. It's funny too, because I remember earlier you mentioned, you know, if I were to put

in a word, Panda, which clearly this was on your mind, is that similar to how the subconscious works when you get people to guess certain things in a magic act or when you lead someone, you kind of implant something in their brain. So it's at the top of their mind. So what do you mean exactly? I need you to rephrase. I didn't quite catch that. You had mentioned an example of a word earlier and you use the word Panda.

I'm always looking for a word that they did not mean to hide in there. Oh, I guess Panda. And clearly Panda has been on the word Panda has been on. I did say that before. It's a go to word, I guess. I'm always. But is that similar like how you kind of subconsciously get someone, lead someone to say an answer by putting it in their mind enough times where it's something on

the tip of their tongue for magic or for magic, for magic, for mentalism. Yeah, you can you can get people to say things by by influencing them. It doesn't always work and you take risks to hope somebody will fall into that trap. But and you always have a backup planning in case they don't say what you want them to say, but that's just fun for us to to try to pull that off. I was wondering earlier when you said Panda, why the word Panda was on your mind. And now I know. I don't know why that's great.

I think that that proves so many points. But back to the puzzle he loves the most. Let me show you the puzzle I'm maybe most proud of. This was a Halloween puzzle. What year was it? 2013, you have in the upper left hand corner, the word Wolfman. Right. And then in the middle of the puzzle, vertically, you have the word mirrors.

Oh, my God. So Wolfman's on the left hand side of the puzzle. On the right hand side, it says Wolfman seen through mirrors and you have to write it backward in the on the right. Then and these are all universal monster movies. So then you have Universal Studios. Role of 1931 is monster from Frankenstein's monster. Seen through mirrors is retznam, which is monster backward.

Right. There's then here you have phantom. Right. And over here you have phantom backward from phantom of the opera. But then in the lower left hand corner, you have Dracula seen through the mirrors. And there's nothing on the right hand side. You know, so no reflection for Dracula. So there is a blank space in the puzzle.

And what's fun here is, right, as you as you look at this, you think everything is one letter longer than it really is because there's a blank space you have to account for. Oh, oh, my gosh. So all of those downs. Yeah, evil. So you so it's a little story, right? And it's a little you take them down this path

and they see what's going on and they figure out what the initial trick is. But then like a good matter trick, there's a twist and you get to the bottom of it and you try to reflect Dracula and you can't. Oh, my gosh. The setups, the punchlines, the long game, then that sweet, sweet dopamine at the moment of a payoff. It is storytelling and we tell our lives through narrative. And it's how we make sense of the world.

And it's set up and payoff. It's it's foreshadowing and reveal and conclusion. And I think we've run our lives through that. Yeah, absolutely. Our brains are wired to love that somehow. We like completion, right? Yeah, you know, you were saying that we're geared toward completion and and how satisfying that is, but there there must be something that is not satisfying.

There must be something that sucks about writing puzzles. Is it is it ire from the public? Is it anxiety? Is it what sucks? What sucks when? Yeah, when people don't get it, when they don't, when they don't appreciate what you wrote, so I I had a New York Times Sunday crossword that I joke was that Sunday Crossword America hated and and I'll show it to you.

It was it was the date. Do you remember the date on this? Yeah, I'm going to get it right here. Let me look it up. It was really upsetting. Did you know that it was going to be a tough one? It's it's not that it was tough. It's that people did not get the the extra level of complexity to it.

They didn't get you. Yeah, so OK, so here we go. It was called. Could you repeat that number? New York Times Sunday Puzzle September 6th, 2020. OK, have a ball, guys, it's and the way it worked was the clues with double numbers. 11, 22, 30, 3, 44, all the way up to 99.

OK. You you have to picture the clue. There's the number and and then the clue follows it and you would read that number as the word double. So for clue 33, it read 33, 07 film. And it reads as double 07 film. And the answer was you only live twice. This is really, I thought, very clever and mean.

But for 44 across, it's you, the letter you, procedure. And I wanted everybody to write the letter T, which comes before you. But if you read it correctly, it's double you procedure, which is V. I'll just give you a couple more examples. Day competitor was double day competitor. Publishing house Little Brown and company was the answer. So a tree alternative, double tree alternative was intercontinental. Oh, my God.

But what happened is is you can miss that layer to it. There's no apparent trickiness to the answer. Right. When you have an answer that has a bit of a joke to it or there's letters kind of mixed up or replaced or a funny phrase that comes out of it, then you know that some transformation happened and something occurred. But people took 07 film and they wrote down, they solved for you only live twice. And they thought, OK, well, that's a movie and that's a real phrase. And I guess that answers the clue 07 film.

But they didn't think like why. It's not really an 07 film. It's a double 07 film. It's like when you laugh at a joke, but you don't fully get it. And who among us hasn't done that every day of their lives? Yeah, I think I was asking too much. The title was Could You Repeat That Number? And what kind of feedback did you get?

Did you get some people who are like respect, man? I got I got respect from certain constructors that I think Mike Salinger was an amazing puzzle writer, wrote on Twitter. Do you realize how hard it was for David to get these thematic answers to fall at the double clue numbers? It was really, really hard. And the second half of that question was, and does anyone care? I mean, you kind of pointed out that it was like a feat of construction.

That's not really worth it, right? Like only a few people noticed. I don't know. It was the Puzzle America hated. But I just had to point out that for fun at 111 across, the clue is a suggestion. Double less suggestions. And the answer is root. Oh, and the reason it is root is because you read that as triple A suggestion. It's at 111.

So that was a bonus little answer. Oh, my gosh, oh, I have no idea how that works. And that's OK. I mean, it was a good puzzle, people. Come on. It was a good puzzle. I think that if you've if you've stumped some people that is a job well done a bit, you know, you just push them a little bit past their limit. That's good. I think it's good.

What about a favorite word or your favorite thing about the job? Let's see. Favorite word. I like. Quixotree, which is related to quixotic. That was the highest scoring scrabble word of all time. That was something like 380 points or something. No, it maybe it was like, let's look it up. Sorry. Quixotree scored

three hundred and sixty five points. Yeah, dang. I don't want word. Someone's got to have that tattooed on their body because it it hit two triple letter, two triple word scores at the same time, which is like your holy grail trip, trip. Scrabble three hundred and sixty five points. Yeah. Nice.

So that might be a favorite word. Quixotic. Yeah. What was the other question? What do I dislike about the job? What do you love the most? Oh, I love performing the enigmatist and I hope to hope you get a chance to come see it at some point. It's it's me just doing what I love on stage.

And I've had so much fun talking about all this with you and doing a deep dive on these puzzles and the puzzle fans come out for it and people that want to learn about puzzles and the whole show starts with kind of like an escape room that you have to solve to get into the theater and it's just nerd fest. It's just like it's a great time to love puzzles and games. It's such a good show. I had to cut out part of the interview here because of spoilers, but let's just say follow David Kwong on social media and hope that the enigmatist

has a theatrical run in your town. And it's a very fun interactive show. And as I said before, hopefully it makes people feel smart. And that's the ultimate goal. Thank you so much for doing this. So fun. This is the best. So ask Brainiacs some basic ask questions because apparently learning keeps our lights

on. So follow him at David Kwong on Instagram and Twitter. He is wonderful. I'll link that in the show notes. His website is DavidKwangMagic.com and he also sells this gorgeous card set called Enigmas, which features four of these special puzzle cards. He says they're not too hard. They just require you to think outside the box. So solving all four puzzle cards in that deck unlocks this online puzzle hunt.

So those are at his website. It's an Enigmas deck and that will be linked on my website in case you need a really great gift idea. They were co-produced by David Shukan and Chris Chelco. And David is also available for speaking gigs through his agents at CAA. And he's the author of an upcoming kids book of magic tricks called How to Fool Your Parents, which will be out in 2023. So look for that. So look him up.

He's great. We are at Alangies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Allie Ward with 1L on both. Alangies merch is available at AlangiesMerch.com. We have socks and sweatshirts and top bags and shirts and stickers. AllieGiesMerch.com. Thank you, Susan Hale, for managing that and doing so much more for us. Erin Talbert admins the AllieGies podcast Facebook group. This is from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltas.

Emily White of The Wordery makes our professional transcripts. Caleb Patton Gleeps episodes. Those are available at alleyward.com slash AllieGies-extras. Kelly R. Dwyer does our website and she can make yours. We have kid-friendly and shorter episodes available called Smologies. You can find them right in this feed or you can find them all at alleyward.com slash Smologies. Thank you, Mercedes-Maitland and Seek Rodriguez Thomas of Mind Gem Media for editing those. And extra editing this week was done by the wonderful Dave Christensen.

Thank you so much, sir. Excellent job. And also by Jared Sleeper of Mind Gem Media, who is both puzzling and magical in the best ways. And a huge, huge happy birthday to Noel Dilworth, who is my right-hand lady. Do not know how I would live without her. Happy birthday, Ballerina. You're the best. And if you listen to the end of the episode, you know, I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that we just went to Tucson, Arizona for the Thanksgiving holiday. We visited Jared's fam, his aunt Emily, his grandma Sue, who's amazing.

And we sat around, we played some board games. They love banana grams, as do I. His grandma's so good at banana grams, man. And we were playing and all in a frenzy. And then she shouted banana and she finished her tiles and looked over and she played some great words. One of them was cunt, C-U-N-T. And I was like, you

treasure, I love you. So get out there, play some games. Good for your brain. OK, bye bye. Oh, you should see the crossword puzzle.