Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - The Man Behind Wordle

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Samsung Unpacked happened this week and have the phones in hand! Marques and Andrew go over the S22 and the S22 Ultra before having a chat with Josh Wardle. You may have heard of the viral game Wordle that he created but you might not know that he was also one of the minds behind a few popular April Fool's day experiments at Reddit too. Whether you're interested in the new phones or what went into the making of this viral hit, this episode is a good one. Links: Samsung Galaxy S22 Impressions: https://bit.ly/3Bf7feF Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra Impressions: https://bit.ly/3Lkd4w9 Wordle: https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 https://twitter.com/powerlanguish Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Shop the merch: shop.mkbhd.com Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And it's Samsung week. So we had a Samsung event unpacked, a couple new phones, some tablets. But also this week, we spoke to a special guest. And we'll be getting to that right after we talk about Samsung stuff.

Josh Wardle, who is the creator of the now infamous Wordle game. If that name sounded familiar, it's because it is. It's a pretty familiar word. So we're going to be talking to him. He's great. He's a fellow creator also fellow ultimate frizzy player and has a lot of really interesting answers to a lot of my wordle questions so i've had some dying questions and i finally got to ask him to him so stay tuned for those for sure but i think right off the top we should jump into the new phones you mean our new mug our almost forgot. Because this is way more exciting than Samsung phones. And that's also out of focus.

Yeah, it might not autofocus that. We'll just take some nice pictures and we can put it up on video. But yeah, Waveform mug. Really excited about that. It's beautiful. Red and black. Matte black. Wouldn't have it any other way.

Yeah, red interior, black outside. Very nice. We're just, it's all, it's a, we're all about the details here on waveform shop.mqbhd.com yeah sounds awful when it smacks the table and in your headphones you're welcome we'll try not to do that put this over here yeah there it is nice okay sorry back to samsung in the same matte black color i now have here the phantom black galaxy s22 ultra and i have the pink gold galaxy s22 plus which do you want to talk about first i mean i know you want to talk about pink first so let's do it all right pink s22 plus oh wait i just noticed something i haven't taken the plastic off can i on the mic if you put it right

next to it this is big for me i already took the plastic this is like getting a promotion like easy now sorry i sorry i'm not gonna get to do this very often but uh i'm gonna do my own public plastic peel i just want to say that was pretty good that was a good one i i'm a natural so that's the first time that phone's ever been fully brand new. Although I think there's some plastic on the bottom too. But sure, let's talk about S22 and S22 Plus first. Let's just do regular first. So these phones are straight from the design of the S21

with a few small changes really. New specs being Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or a 4nm Exynos chip depends on the region you're in but we have the Snapdragon 1 here basically the same dimensions but slightly smaller

so we went from a 6.2 to a 6.1 inch display on the smaller phone and I think a 6.7 to a 6.6 inch display on this bigger one you're holding and then

this feels bigger does it feel bigger or heavier? I think it the general sense of feeling of this feels bigger it doesn't feel bigger or heavier i think it the general sense of feeling of it feels bigger interesting while it might be smaller i i feel like the thickness is a bit thicker it's since it's like flat edges and just kind of flat all around it i mean it's got a small curve on the side i don't know this feels bigger in my hand okay then well what are you comparing it to the old the s21 plus okay yeah no it is definitely so the couple things i noticed number one i really

love the back it's got this like satin even though i wouldn't get pink whatever it is a satin finish on the back and it is slightly more squared off and i like that about it i think that's what makes it feel like thicker almost um and i would like to see the green really bad because i think the green probably looks really nice i did green um i have also noticed while the s22 and 22 plus keep this kind of like similar camera bump it's not completely flush with the corner right like the old one um it has like this little lip there which isn't that big of a deal i still like the design i was kind of saying when we first saw this that this almost looks like an early CAD rendering of the S21

before they put finishing touches on it really smoothed out. Because it's boxier. Because it's boxier. It just feels like, hey, let's do a quick mock-up. This is the really squared-off version of it that's not all the minute details in the design and i can see that but i like it better which is also weird that i think it looks less finished but i like it better i do like it better also so it's also a couple other small things

about it one the back is metal not plastic the bat yep oh sorry the back is glass not okay yeah the rails are still metal but the back was glastic on the s21 s21 plus this is uh this is actually glass so that's cool it does feel better a little bit more dense a little bit i think it's actually the same weight despite being smaller so it's a little more dense okay and then the other thing is the battery is actually smaller so this is something we were noting we were watching the presentation and you noted that there's like a big difference between the big phone and the small phone battery size. Both of them did get 300 milliamp hours smaller. This one is the big one I'm holding is now it's a 4,500 milliamp hour battery down from 4,800. And the small one went from

4,000 to 3,700. So I'm interested in seeing how the battery life holds up. Um, because the one other small change is the display is now an adaptive refresh rate from 10 to 120 hertz notably i asked samsung if it's an ltpo display and they said no the ltpo display on the ultra goes from 1 to 120 hertz this is just an adaptive refresh rate display from 10 to 120 hertz not sure if that's going to be more efficient than before if it's going to make up for the smaller battery i have yet to actually answer that considering samsung's told us almost nothing we can't make that much of a an assumption no idea hopefully like when we're going through the review a little deeper maybe they'll give us some better information

i mean this is like hour three holding the phones like i've only we had the first hands-on experience i just peeled the plastic off. So we haven't gotten very far on these yet. But I really dig how this looks. I think Samsung's killing it lately. Again, I don't love the pink color or the bronze, whatever. Aren't they calling it like pink bronze? This is pink gold.

Pink gold. Yeah. And I think the Ultra has like a bronze color. Better than when Apple went rose gold and turned it into a band-aid so we're there yeah um but yeah i want to see the green really bad let's swap over to the ultra the note uh s i think you made that joke already so it's probably not that funny um s22 ultra so we got a bunch of new things with the s22 ultra number one camera bump here's the s21 ultra that i loved so much gone now just the rings the the rumors are true it does have that slightly new design you can see

that in the hands-on video i don't really love or hate it i think just thought of something though okay looking at these up next to each other because this is going the more note uh route which is like the totally flat edge i don't think they would have been able to round it as nicely with the rounded edge on top of this so do you think that's why they eliminated the the bump completely well i think they eliminated the bump because they made a note oh yeah i thought they could still like keep it all it's weird to have three, a lineup of three phones where one of them has a different looks very different, like the camera pump. So I'll just jump right into that then. So, uh, this phone is a stylus built in just like a

Samsung galaxy note. This phone has a top flat and bottom, just like a Samsung galaxy note. Uh, and this phone has the curved sides and all of the dimensions that a Samsung Galaxy Note would have. So my running theory, almost sarcastically, but also like kind of seriously a little bit, is I think Samsung just made a Samsung Galaxy Note 22 Ultra and then just called it a Galaxy S22 Ultra and slotted it in at the top. It looks different because it is different, but it has all the same spec upgrades. It still has a 5,000 milliamp hour battery despite adding an s pen inside. That's really impressive same Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Baseline spec has 8 gigs of RAM all the higher specs all the way up to 1 terabyte of storage have 12 gigs of RAM

So that's pretty sweet Although they had a 16 gig RAM version last time I don't know if you know so they don't have that anymore but some new cameras some new stuff to check out for me but the new display is a 1750 nits peak brightness which is amazing can't wait to use that outside it was already really good but this is even better funnily enough i know a while ago i mean we're talking it might be two years by now but when we were no it was probably just last year we were wondering if there was going to be a note series then there wasn't then we were

wondering if the note was dead and we kind of thought that either the note will come back or the s22 will have an s pen while we said that and while that's technically what happened this is not what I was expecting I wasn't expecting to literally just release a new Note, call it an S22. I was expecting more of an upgrade to the actual S22 with like the old rounded edges, the old top and everything like that. This is literally just a new Note.

Right. And I love it. Yeah. I love that they did that. I think it's fascinating. So now the new, I just want to say all the starting prices, $799 for the S22, $99 for the s22 plus pretty premium and then 11.99 starting for the s22 ultra there's going to be a lot of users that grab the s22 ultra because it's the highest end one and

are just going to get an s pen i i guess they just never use it they just never take it out of the phone never care about it. Yeah, I'm not sure. I guess I have a couple thoughts. First of all, I already have friends texting me about this, and one thing I always forget when this happens is Samsung's trade-in program is phenomenal. I have a friend who's about to get an S22 Ultra, and he's getting it for like...

50 bucks or something. It's just under $900 turning in like an s10 something which is just impressive like that's they're turning in an s10 and getting the s22 ultra for like 900 bucks oh so they get 300 bucks off that's solid a three-year-old phone doing that that's awesome um my other thing is i agree with you i think there's gonna be a lot of people who get this because it's the bleeding edge top of the line phone and don't care about the S Pen. If this is the only note from now on from Samsung, I would love for them to do an A series with an S Pen or something smaller because every time we talk about the stylus, we get so many people saying that they

do enjoy the stylus, but they don't need this bleeding edge top of the line four cameras 100 times zoom like stuff like that they just use it every day um there is stuff out there like the moto g stylus that maybe works that but like that's one of the most surprising things about samsung to me is they seem to be perfectly willing to make a bunch of different phones like we just got the s21 fe right before these they make a ton of different various phones at different price ranges and different features i am surprised that the only way that they offer an s pen is in a phone that starts at 1199 i feel like they would kill uh like 500 with an s pen and you mentioned motorola like there's other companies that are

doing cheaper phones with s pens, Moto G Stylus. But, like, what if Samsung did, yeah, like an A52 type thing, but the same convenience factors. Maybe it's not extremely fast. Maybe the response rate isn't quite the same. But, like, the general convenience of, like, marking up a PDF or, like, circling things on a diagram if you're an architect. Like, all that stuff still applies. And the phone is $599 instead of $129999 that that i'm surprised they don't do that i feel like that would sell very it's a niche obviously but i do think it would do very well for like like we've

mentioned before landscapers contractors architects anything like that doing stuff out in the field i think it would be awesome the only thing that that maybe strikes me as an answer is maybe Samsung is doing the math on realizing not that many people use the S Pen. And that's why they killed the Note in the first place. And they still have the development and R&D to offer an S Pen. And the tablets, by the way, have great S Pen integrations too.

But turns out people don't really have that much of a use case or not that many people use the s pen on the phone maybe maybe that's the reason it's probably the reason so yeah this is the same reason pixel 4 didn't have an ultra wide camera but doesn't mean i like the reason it doesn't mean it's the right answer yep so yeah i'm gonna be i'm starting to test the phone now so this is uh it's basically just gonna one-to-one replace my galaxy s21 ultra we'll see i think i'm going to like it and i honestly don't suspect i'm going to find too much wrong with it i need to test the software and the battery and the cameras of course i've already started taking 8k videos of mac it still did the weird punch in that was

that was actually something i already found that was weird um i'm gonna turn on location when i hit uh video mode look how much it punches in oh it punches into like 3x even though i'm gonna turn on location when i hit a video mode look how much it punches in oh it punches into like 3x even though i'm still i thought i would still be using the primary camera but i guess not so i need to figure that part out we'll try and figure it but you know who's even shooting ak video that's always the biggest bummer is when you like and this is just for all phones but like you set up a shot and then you realize you're not in video mode yet and you want to do it on video and then you click it and then you're like oh man i'm not framed at all for this correctly and then maybe your back's up against something already and you realize now

you can't take video of it or maybe you just still have a pixel 4 and still don't have an ultra wide camera and you're definitely not salty about that at all yeah no that's that's something i'll play with but the bottom line is we'll be testing these the reviews are coming in the next one to two weeks per use let me know in the comments whether this is the clip or the full episode what you want to see in that review that always helps me but yeah also check out the full impressions videos if you just want to know my first thoughts in the first hour with it do you think you want to get one of these phones that's my last question honestly i i think i want to just get like an s21 ultra for way cheaper really good fun i think that like i honest i know i highly doubt like that would be the ending of this video is like recommending

an s21 ultra but if it's so close to it if you really like the design of the s21 ultra which i think a lot of people prefer prefer how this looks especially on the back yeah so here's my only like counter to that i do love the note style the note style it's a one year newer phone which means one extra year of guaranteed software support um it's also going to be just you know slightly better spec those types of things if you can get a good trade-in like you mentioned their program is pretty good like i would the thing like people always i guess this is so tired for me on twitter because i see it every time i talk about a phone but everyone's like this isn't of good upgrade from last year's phone of course it's not yeah that's just like the the new kia forte is not a great upgrade from last year's kia forte of

course it's not but for people who have older phones people who have 2017 2018 phones this is the this represents the best available so if you do really strongly prefer the design that much yeah you'll be able to find a discount on s21 or if you want to spend mid mid-range prices on last year's flagship if you find a good discount i'll say this way just from my first experience now if you find a good discount on s21 ultra i have no problem recommending that phone despite one less year of guaranteed software updates, but I have a feeling this is going to be a very similar, very good phone. Also, I don't know how

we didn't say this. I think we got sidetracked, but we talked about that camera bump and how this is singular lenses on the S22 Ultra. I hated it at first, but I think that's just because that's how good the S21 Ultra looked. I think this looks fine. Actually, black, I think this looks really sick.

The more I'm looking at it. Cases are going to be kind of interesting. I don't know. I'm starting to really dig the singular lenses. See how fast it grows on you? See how fast that happens? One day. Yeah.

There it is. Plus, you don't have to look at the back much. All right. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back, and we're going to talk Wordle, being a creator, and viral hits all in one stay tuned bet mgm authorized gaming partner of the nba has your

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I went to powerlanguage.co.uk, and I played the world game that I have played so often. I've never gotten it in two before, so I was really excited because on my first guess, I got three greens. And I really thought this was it. I thought it was finally happening. I was going to get three greens on the second. I was going to get all of them green on the second one. My second guess was wrong, though. And then my third guess was wrong. And then my fourth guess was wrong. And so I got it in five out of six. And I was kind of mad, but I also felt I posted it on the internet and i felt sort of united with the rest of the world in our collective frustration so um today we have the

man responsible for that united collective frustration josh wortel thanks for joining us on waveform today thank you for having me on so i guess first of all, your name is very close to the Wordle game. It's one letter off, basically. Well done. Yeah. Please break down the background of, I guess, how you created it, why you created Wordle, the sort of origin story. I'm sure you've probably told it a million times. Yeah. So on the name front, yeah, it's a play on my name. It's a word game. It was one of those things. I'm sure you've had this with a project where you start it and you just give it a dumb, it needs a name. You give it a dumb name and you're like, that's a dumb name. I'll change it in the future. And then obviously, like a bunch of things about this project, the domain, for instance, powerlanguage.co.uk forward slash word will probably not where you want to launch a viral game, given that no one can remember any of that and they have to google it yep uh but yeah so uh i actually this was a game that i made for my uh partner she and i really enjoy playing word games uh especially some of the ones that the new york times offers so they have daily

crosswords a game called spelling bee that's kind of uh you play once a day and it's a word game so my goal was to make a game for her that she would enjoy playing and Wordle was it. Like I had made a prototype of it a long time ago, back in 2013. And it was similar, but had some key differences. And I basically just put it away. I shared it with a few friends, people were like, yeah, not really. And then at the beginning of 2021, we were playing a lot of games. I got a bit more confident as a developer. And I was like, I think that idea had some legs.

So I dusted it off and I made it. And it was literally just the two of us playing it for six months. And then I introduced it to some friends and family in the UK. And then kind of November, it just started. It got picked up by a few like tech bloggers and then it really, really took off beginning of December. And then, yeah, it's been a roller coaster. So it started really just with a couple people

you shared it with. And did it always have that share metric at the end? Because as soon as I saw those bars, I knew that was gonna accelerate it. But at one point, did that get added? Yeah, so that was added sometime in late November, I think. So what happened, a tech blogger, Andy Bio, he runs Waxy.org, where he kind of collects interesting things online.

He had tweeted about it and posted a blog post about it, and it got picked up in a New York Times newsletter. And then as a result of that, for reasons that I don't understand, it got really popular in New Zealand. And I've heard about New Zealand that it has a very interconnected Twitterverse, right? Not many people live in New Zealand comparatively to somewhere like the US. So people tend to be very connected. And at this point, that share grid, the emoji share grid that you're talking about, didn't exist. So people would just say, I got the wordle in three you know and a player over there who i don't know a woman named elizabeth s she started typing out her results as that emoji

grid and then i saw other people copying it so people literally opening their emoji keyboard and then going back and forth between the two and typing it out so i was like i can integrate that into you know into the game really easily and then that obviously has had a huge uh impact because it gives you this artifact that's even though i did a bunch of things and i did this throughout wordle i did a bunch of things that are the opposite of what you're meant to do if you're trying to make something go viral or grow like there's no link back to the game for instance in the in the share grid it did give you this artifact and invited you to share and that's obviously done wonders for it in terms of it uh catching on and spreading around yeah that is definitely how i found it i think there was a couple people who shared their grids in my timeline and by the way a funny story is i

still know some people who typed out the emoji grid manually for some reason which is hilarious yeah yeah yeah but yeah that's how i found it it was funny though you mentioned you know you did a couple things in the game that were not necessarily designed to help accelerate its growth it was just like it's almost this like pure simple thing that you sort of stumble across on the internet kind of like the old days almost a little bit um were there things you thought about like it starts growing and then you've you've had other experiments like this in the past i want to talk about but did you think of other things you could do with wordle to maybe change it up or was there sort of a beauty to keeping it simple yeah i think that's a really good question i think because i had started it simple and i had a really clear idea of what i was doing

with it it made it really easy to say no to any of those compulsions as they came up because you know whereas if my goal had been to make a viral game from the outset i think i would have been you know capitalizing on this in like a bunch of different ways and like maybe but but it felt like i don't know with all the projects that i've done that have been successful i found part of it is not it's just kind of doing the thing that feels authentic to me and if people happen to like that then great if they don't not and so then allowing wordle's success to like make me change it which obviously i was willing to do right I did add the share grid, which was something that wasn't there originally.

So there is a boundary there, but I don't know. If I start, I have to think about what are my motivations when I'm doing this thing and are they aligned with, it gets really hard when you're doing things for the wrong reasons, basically. So I find it simpler to keep it the same.

Are there any features you would like to see? Is this a feature request coming? Yeah, no, no, no. i i like that it's simple i think as soon as i saw it i was like oh well i can't believe there's only one word a day i just want to keep playing but like well maybe they'd add five six letter words seven letter words maybe they do a bunch of other stuff but i like that it was simple it was just a clean one single purpose for it the entire time and i actually want i wanted to talk to you because I feel like as a creator, I feel like I relate a lot to you because one of the things I've said for a long time is one of the best things that never happened to me was having a video of mine,

just spike and just go super viral and then feel like I have to chase that carrot or, and like evolve and become sort of defined by that viral success um how do you feel about like you've had other projects i want to talk about uh the place and the button and what those are um how do you think about like the success of those projects and not letting it define you yeah i mean this is incredibly hard and uh it kind of does define me in a way that i don't actually feel comfortable with uh like i feel good when a project i make does well i feel bad when a project i make doesn't do well and that is not healthy i think and i think to a certain degree it's unavoidable as a creator putting stuff stuff out and sharing it. But at the same time, I think it's led to some quite unpleasant places for me personally.

And then again, in terms of when we're talking about what is your motivation, it kind of gets confusing. If you're making things to be a success, but that wasn't the motivation when you made the original things that were successful, how does all that get? It all gets a bit murky. And so, yeah, I had these projects at Reddit that are kind of more, I would call like social experiments than games. And they, Silicon Valley tends to do these really dumb April Fool's Day things where they like make a prank and it's super lame and everyone looks at it. And at Reddit, I was like, what if we do something different? and everyone looks at it and i read it i was like what if we do something different like we use this day where we can do we're kind of locked into the things we can do with our users what if we use this one day a year where you can kind of do anything online that people are really kind of

wasting in my opinion and we do something just try something completely different and so that is where kind of the reddit approach now of like often doing a social experiment that explores the way that humans interact at large scales online um kind of kind of came from uh and and and just like a general disappointment with the lack of imagination in the tech world i think we're on the same page about tech world april fools yeah i the button was really interesting i kind of vaguely remember because it was so long ago but you so you you were working at Reddit and you had the opportunity to try something cool, something fun, like a social experiment on, and that was a great day to do it. What was the button? Just break down what exactly that was.

Yeah. So the button's super simple. It is a subreddit. So Reddit is organized into communities called subreddits of people who share similar interests. And there was a subreddit called the button. And at the top of the button. There was a subreddit called The Button. And at the top of The Button, there was a button and a timer. The timer counts down from 60 seconds. If you press the button, the timer resets back up to 60 and starts counting down. The key thing is that you can only ever press the button once. You have to be logged in.

And once you press the button, you can never press it again. So then the question becomes, how long will the collective internet decide to keep pressing this button right like if it reaches zero it stops and it will never run again and so you have a 60 second window in which to press the button and it turns out the answer is two months so over two months every 60 seconds someone somewhere chose to press the button which ended up being over a million people. And there was a bunch of stuff there like the time that you pressed. We gave you on Reddit, we called it flair. It's like a little tag that appears next to your username in the community.

And so if you pressed it early, you got a different color next to your name than if you pressed it later. And then so all these social hierarchies started forming you know people who pressed it early were seen as impulsive and they couldn't wait whereas if you held it if you waited for two months you could press it when there were only two seconds left on the button you get red flare and then people would be like whoa but uh so that all these weird social dynamics emerged from this like really really simple uh idea and and that's one thing that i found works really well for me as kind of we were talking about earlier like have you been you know all the what ifs like what if you change this what if you change this and i think what i found worked

for me with the projects at reddit and to an extent wordle is like trying to make things as simple as possible. It's so easy to say with a creative project, what if we do this? What if we do this? Because no one knows the answer, right? And instead I found it easier to be like, well, how much can we remove and still leave the core idea here and still make it an enjoyable experience? Yeah, I love that. That is a fascinating psychological experiment and just like, just has just the right amount of small, simple tie-ins to like, if you know, you know, that type of thing. It kind of reminds me of when we did the blind smartphone camera test, especially the first year we ever did this. Just sort of we had this random idea of like, what if we wanted to compare smartphone cameras, but then just didn't tell people what they were?

And we put them up in this like bracket style thing and just hand people two pictures and just hey pick one you don't know what it is and even at that point it started getting kind of complicated because we had to seed them behind the scenes and sort of figure out how we organize everything but i like the the idea of something being so pure and simple just a button how long can we go and then the natural curiosity of like well how long will it go and what will people do about it um what the other one is the place that was also at reddit right what was the that was another subreddit correct yeah yeah so that was place it was a uh it was a blank canvas uh it was a thousand pixels wide by a thousand pixels high so a million pixels total yeah and you could as a user you could place a tile anywhere on the canvas and the caveat was you could only place one tile every five

minutes and so uh as an individual you couldn't really impact the canvas right placing one tile every five minutes you can't have an effect but if you can find a large group of people that are aligned with you and you can all work together to paint the same thing essentially and so it was a bit of a gamble to be honest right like giving the anonymous internet internet or pseudonymous internet a blank canvas yeah on which to paint you know it's like you assume the worst of the internet is going to emerge um but like part of it for me was understanding that most people or my belief that most people when given the choice wanted to do the good thing and by creating an experience where you could only achieve anything by collaborating it was going to be way

easier for people to come together to do a positive thing that it was for them to come together and do a bad thing you know if you want to draw something heinous on the canvas you would have to convince a bunch of other people that that was a valuable use of their time and i think a lot of what we see online you know there are it like the power of a toxic individual or small group of individuals to really dictate the experience for the many is kind of warps our sense of like actually i think most people will try and do positive things for sure that's that's a great psychological experiment and a great result that sort of came out of it i do remember that although i don't know what i did with my tile i kind of forget there's a bunch there's a lot that was

yeah yeah it was pretty it was pretty busy and and to be clear like there at the very start of it like a big phallic image started emerging in the center of the canvas and that was like oh here i was like are we gonna have to shut this down right like is this basically a bathroom stall and what we actually one of the things that i've reflected on a lot since then is that we had we have created this space for people to interact online and in making in creating it we'd made a bunch of decisions that actually really meaningfully impact how people can interact. You know, they're placing tiles. They can only place one every five minutes.

Another decision that we made and had thought about a little bit but not a lot was where they would start on the canvas. So initially, we were just starting everyone in the middle, which is where this unpleasant image started emerging. And so we were like, in response to that happening, we were like, well, we control this experience. How can we influence people so that this isn't the outcome? Because we think there's more here. And so the fix there was really simple. We just randomized people's starting position. And it turns out if they started on a blank area of the canvas, they would think more about what they wanted to do or like, you know, start creating something totally different. Whereas if we were all dumping people in the same spot together just they contributed to the first thing they saw which was yeah yeah yeah no it's funny now you know

reminding myself of like these super really interesting things that have happened in the past it almost seems like if i if i had known that maybe one person was behind both the place and the button that it's like almost inevitable that something else is going to happen that I should pay attention to in a sort of social experiment world. Although Wordle sort of had the opposite origin. You didn't have the huge community of Reddit. You had a small group that turned into a big group. Is there a pressure to like think of the next big idea?

Like this is another creator question. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I actually, I returned. like think of the next big idea like this is another creator question yeah oh yeah so i actually i returned so i i after place i left reddit uh and then i rejoined as a so i was there not as an engineer initially and i rejoined as an engineer and part of rejoining was to i work on these projects again and i did two other april fools day projects at reddit there were no way near as successful like they weren't successful really by my metric. And that really felt bad. Like I felt like I wanted to be making things that were like place and that successful. And that kind of, I think, led me astray a bit in terms of the kinds of experience. I wasn't creating experiences because they felt

necessarily authentic to what I wanted to do. I was doing them because I wanted to make another viral. I wanted to make something as big as Place. And then Wordle was just like, yeah, not any of that at all. Like I wasn't thinking about any of these things. I was just making the experience my partner would like and that I would like. And it happened to really catch people's attention. And yeah, I think that's so, so I suppose if I go out deliberately to try and make the next big thing, I feel intense pressure.

And I've found that that doesn't actually lead to the positive things, but it's kind of frustrating. Like, how do I make this my job? How do I make creating things my job? If my only way is like, like I said, I made a prototype for wordle in 2013 if i have to mull on every idea for like multiple years like that that and i'm sure you struggle with this right like you have to make things on a cadence and how i'm fascinated by people how you i'll be interested to hear how you think about approaching creative stuff when you're on when you have to have consistent output basically it seems impossible from my perspective yeah there's there's a good amount it's a really good question there's a lot of outside influence that helps you

sort of guide yourself to see what people are interested in and that helps you know little things that appear in videos generally but the thing that i always started with which was way back this is more than 10 years ago is i started making videos that I would want to watch. So I didn't really have a target audience in mind because it wasn't actually a real job to be a YouTuber. So I was kind of lucky in that sense. So I was just making videos for fun because I was like, I really want a channel to exist that does these types of tutorials and tech videos. So I'm just going to make it. I'm just going to do them because Because if I found that channel, I'd subscribe. So hey, maybe it will work.

And that's been the common thread through everything. So it kind of works the same way with Wordle. You made something that you knew one person would like. And it turns out there's a lot of people that also like the same thing. So it was a success for that reason. But really the core of it is like, there is a guaranteed target demographic of one

that I can tailor it really well for. And it sort of grows from there. Yeah, and I think it means when you're creating, you can feel really good about what you're creating, right? Like you're just doing this thing that feels true to you. And then that makes, that answers, I have found that answers a lot of other questions. Like anytime you're making something,

a bunch of questions come up like those what ifs and having a clear idea of like, no, I'm trying to make the experience that feels good to me often answers a bunch of those questions so it's really useful heuristics all right we got to take a quick break when we come back we're going to talk a lot more wordle You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus.

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waveform. So now, so Wordle is now an international phenomenon. I mean, I wake up every day and it's trending on Twitter before I even opened Twitter. So it's, it's getting out there. I want to know, I want to get your reactions to some of the like biggest things that have happened in Wordle world. Number one is all these big companies sort of like jumping on the bandwagon of like doing a Wordle meme or something like that.

Like if you Google Wordle right now, there's a nice little animation that plays at the top. But have you seen other companies like using wordle in in ads and tweets and random stuff like that yeah i mean isn't this indicative that it's jumped the shark you know it's on the down once once the brands arrive then you know you are desperately uncool uh i i mean i don't really mind about that stuff. I know why people do it. I feel great empathy for social media managers who have to constantly be generating content. And so they're constantly having to react

to whatever the latest thing is online. I've been through enough viral things online to know the internet has an insatiable appetite. It always wants something new. And right now, kind of wordle is that thing. It won't be for much longer, I can't imagine it will hold people's attention. So this is just like, part of how part of how these things go. And like, whether I like that or not, is kind of immaterial, I suppose.

Yeah, there's like a, like a half life of any internet object, like the half life of a tweet is probably like 24 hours for like all the activity to occur and happen unless it's some crazy massive tweet. The half-life of a YouTube video might be in a tech world maybe like six months, you know, because, you know, by the next year a new stuff comes out to replace it. I guess the half-life of like Wordle is a total question mark right now. There is an account, though, by the way, that's, you've seen this. It's like Wordle stats and it tells you how many people have played every day and how many people use hard mode every day.

I'm fascinated. That's my buddy Kevin. Oh really? Okay, yeah. He's the VP of engineering at Kickstarter. Yeah, yeah. He just made it in his spare time. That is another great account to follow because it shows you like,

oh, this was a frustrating day for a lot of people. I see a lot of fives and sixes out whatever so that's that's a fun one for me um so just when i see that account i do see that it is still growing but i have a bunch of i have a bunch of wordle specific questions just i have to ask like while i have you wordle it's it's a massive thing so i need to know number one five letter word was there any reason you chose five letters versus four or six is there just a great catalog of five letter words yeah so i actually when i made the game so the inspiration for the game i played a lot of game called mastermind as a kid i'm not sure if you ever played that it's like you're guessing at a pattern it's very similar

mechanically but you're not guessing words you're guessing colored patterns and so there's no innate meaning encoded in the pattern. You know, it can be blue, blue, green, red, right. And it means nothing. And you just have to like brute force your way through it. And with Wordle, obviously, you know that the answer is a word and you know that, you know, the word is very unlikely to begin with an X. So you probably won't want to start your guess with an X sort of thing.

Right. But so Mastermind used four pegs. So the first version of Wordle I built actually used four letters and I didn't, it just wasn't satisfying. It was like, it felt like you were repeating a lot. I don't know. It just didn't feel good. And then my plan was to try with five letters, six letters, seven letters, find out which one really felt good. I was, I mean, I'm not a great programmer now. I was an even worse programmer back then. It was a lot of work for me to like incorporate

the word list and stuff like that. So I added five letters and suddenly the game felt very different and I was like, oh, this feels really good. So much so that I actually stopped experimenting with the word length and I just started experimenting with how many guesses you could have to arrive at one of the things we haven't talked about with Wordle, which I think is part of its appeal is it is quite easy it's not it's not that you it's not you are

very unlikely to fail a wordle you can still fail but for the most part you'll get there and it kind of feels good and you feel smart when you get there and some days you get it in three some days it takes six and uh yeah yeah i think it's it's right in that goldilocks zone of like you you almost never immediately get it that would just be a stroke of luck one or two maybe it happens six. And yeah. Yeah. I think it's, it's right in that Goldilocks zone of like, you, you almost never immediately get it. That would just be a stroke of luck one or two. Maybe it happens sometimes I've never gotten it in one or two still, but it is very likely that you'll figure it out by the end, which is a nice, satisfying, charming Goldilocks zone length of guesses. So six worked really well. Uh, you mentioned a word list and I think that's been talked about in the

past. Like if you look in the code of the site you can see this this huge list of five letter words who came up with the words is it every five letter word do you know what the next word is how does this word list work yeah yeah well that sounds like a philosophical question who does come up with words where do words come from but so no there is a dictionary of every word in the english language i don't remember where i got it but so they're about i filtered it down to five letter words they're about 13 000 of them most of them are like absolutely bogus like you and i have never heard of their like jargon or like you know antiquated um and one thing that was so when i built that first prototype in 2013

i just dumped all the words in it and it randomly picked a word and that was the words that you were guessing so it was often a word you never heard of and you kind of ended up having to brute force your way kind of like mastermind um you know because the letter it could begin with the letter x right because it could just be a really obscure word and so uh one of the things when i revisited wordle in January of 2021 was it was, I knew that if I wanted to share it with other people, it would feel unfair if you played Wordle for the first time and the solution was a word that you'd never heard of. Like I couldn't imagine you would ever go back to that game. You'd just be like, this is dumb. And so what I had actually done in the intervening years was build my partner another game which was just every the 13,000 five letter words and it was just a website that displayed one of the words and three

buttons and you had to say I know this word I don't know this word I kind of maybe know this word and she she was going through a tough time at that point she just wanted a mindless game that she could sit there and play so she just categorized all 13,000 words into, I know, I don't know. Yeah. And then we took that list and then did some more filtering on top of that. And that gets down to around two and a half thousand words that can be the solution. So you can enter any of the 13,000 words as a valid guess because they are valid five letter words, but the answer will only ever be from that 2500 list and that list is i just randomized it and stuck it in the code because i want to play the game so i don't actually know what the word is going to be tomorrow smart but obviously that's

a bit uh fraught because like what if we miss the word or something slipped through and there's a bad word coming up or something like that so that's been a source of stress, but one that's been manageable so far. That's funny. So it's kind of a surprise. It's sort of on autopilot now and you're sort of playing the game with everybody else. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is amazing. It kind of reminds me of like game shows.

You know, people always like to watch a game show and feel like they can play along with the game show on TV. There's a game show called Common Knowledge. Literally, it's just like, I think it's Joey Patone, and he's just like asking people literally common knowledge questions. And it's really hard to be bad at this game, but it still is like addicting to play along because you just want to make sure. You just want to make sure you also get it alongside them.

And so I feel like that mechanic, it is, like I said, it's in that Goldilocks zone. Okay, so have you heard of some of these, I'm not going to call them knockoffs. And so I feel like that mechanic, it is, like I said, it's in that Goldilocks zone. Okay. So have you heard of some of these, I'm not going to call them knockoffs. They're like alternate versions of Wordle. My favorite is called Nerdle, which is a math version where you have to come up with a correct equation. You've seen this, right? Yeah.

Do you have a favorite Wordle alternate that's out there right now? Do you have a favorite Wordle alternate that's out there right now? There was one that was very satirical called Letteral, which was that you just had to guess a letter. And so each day it picks one letter and you have 26 guesses to guess it, basically. So it's just like, that was like reducing it. There was one that was also interesting, I think, called DoorDoll, which was like two, you were solving two two wordles at the same time but you're inputting the same guess into both and you kind of had to narrow it down that was kind of interesting but i've been blown away all the riffs did you see

someone did one that was like prime numbers like the answer was a prime number and you could only guess prime numbers and it was like i don't even know that's hard yeah that's hard like those you need more guesses for those that That's really hard. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, no, I love that. I like that there's so many like simple ones though that sort of keeps you going. What has been your,

who's people have been sharing that they play Wordle? Who has surprised you the most that they played Wordle? Who has like shared a Wordle that you didn't expect them to be playing? Oh, interesting. shared a wordle that you didn't expect them to be playing oh interesting i am not very clued in to the world of uh celebs i gotta say uh so yeah i don't i don't know uh i'm amazed anyone's sharing it to be honest i'm amazed anyone that anyone else is is is playing it. So I don't have a compelling answer for you there. I've been playing for weeks and then finally just the other day

when I was talking about the five out of six I got, that's the first time I ever shared it. And literally my Twitter timeline the entire day was useless because everyone was replying with their word results all day. I had like 2000 replies. I was like, everyone is playing this game

and everyone can relate. Same frustration, it's amazing. Wow, very noble of you, I want to call out, being willing to share your first share being a tough game. That's like, a lot of people out there just sharing when they get in three, just bragging and then they hide their struggling days.

So kudos to you. There's ups and downs, so you got to be honest with the people. I got to share it. was that was a fun experience um so now so i just also wanted to touch on ultimate frisbee because i know we have that as a a small connecting thread right you've played all today and you're in you've played in the new york area at some point is that true uh no i never i have not played in new york i used to play so i played for clapham in the uk and then i came and played uh college ultimate at the u of o university of oregon okay uh and then

i played in the bay area so i played mixed for polar bears and blackbirds um and i so i don't think we've ever played against each other i'm not even sure how much we overlapped. But Next Gen, the Next Gen tour was a venture created by my buddy Kevin that I helped him run. And so I knew you were wearing a Next Gen shirt. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. Yeah. And I know like Jimmy and Chris, your teammates on Pony. So I'm not sure.

Do you talk about Ultimate a lot? It's kind of like it feels very like ultimate is so pervasive when i was playing it was like was my life and here you are doing like you're running a business and you're like a very visible figure but then you're also an ultimate frisbee player and i know how demanding it is to be an ultimate frisbee player yeah it comes up once in a while it's funny like yeah i'll wear a jersey once in a while and someone from the comments or someone will email me like, oh, I designed that jersey,

or oh, I played on the team from the year of the jersey. Like, the community is obviously very tightly knit, so anytime anybody finds out some other figure is an ultimate player, it's sort of like an interesting, like, connect-the-dots type of situation. So I just always thought that was funny. So we might not have ever played each other, but I definitely watched lots of U of O games, and I've probably watched Clapham games maybe that you've played in what years were you

playing uh for oregon so i was ufo during the troubled years where we got suspended i'm not sure if you heard about that story uh i don't know so that was 2009 10 and 11 and one of those we had at we were number one in the nation and we had our season canceled due to some misadventures, both on and off the field. As you can imagine, college. Sounds like college ultimate in 2010. Did you play in college?

I did. I started in 2012. And so I was right after that. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. We probably might not have played each other, but that was a sort of a fun connection. So we're both creators and we're both ultimate players so hey if you're ever looking to be more creative maybe playing ultimate is the answer i don't know

just just throwing that out there um last question so wordle is in the hands of the new york times now obviously there was some inspiration there you mentioned those other new york times games um so i i wonder what's next for the man that had such a big hand in The Place and The Button and Wordle. Is there something you already are looking forward to doing next as a creator? Or are you just sort of having a normal life?

Yeah, sorry, don't have an exciting answer here. I joined a company relatively recently. It's like an art collective in brooklyn called mischief uh and uh i'm really enjoying focusing on that and that's what i'm going to do for the short term i'm sure i'll try and create something in future but i don't think i think wordle is probably as big as it's going to get for me i don't think you get more than one wordle in your lifetime mischief is good mischief has a lot of good good viral stuff you know their drops are they leave some they have some some pretty big waves sometimes you know yeah yeah yeah sick all

right well i got one more test for you it's a question uh i wonder how fast you can type the alphabet so i don't know if you've ever watched the waveform podcast, but every guest we have on, we invite them to do the alphabet typing test. Literally all you do is just pull up a keyboard, screen record. I think Adam's going to drop the website in the, in the chat right here. And all you gotta do is get three tries, type it as fast as you can. And we put you on a leaderboard with all of our guests. Everyone's reaction is always like, Oh, here we go. I'm going to have a bad result and an embarrassing spot on the leaderboard. But you might be surprised. You might surprise yourself.

No, I know. I know what my capabilities are. Do you touch type? Are you a touch typist? Use the home row and all that stuff? I think so. I type without looking. That's probably a good enough touch typist.

I am the... Humble here. He clearly touch types. I think I'm top five on the leaderboard. I'm going to forget. Okay, no sweat. Just top five. Yeah, no big deal.

Do you see the link here? Type the alphabet.app. Oh, wow. So that is a good domain name. Northpanelanguage.co.uk. They really nailed what they were going for. This is a good one. They really need a share metric on this website.

They should learn from Wordle. All right. All right. All right. Is this on a system? You mentioned some screen sharing. Yeah, if you do have a screen recorder, you can give it. We're giving everybody three tries. First try, you always sort of feel it out and figure out like,

oh, I'm stumbling over LMNOP or something like that. So we give everybody three. Okay. Well, so the screen recorder is unrelated to the software we're using right now right this is just right right that's so we'll put it in we'll put it in the podcast pop open quick time here sweet all right yeah okay i kind of keyword thing so very shamefully as a programmer i'm using the i don't even know what you call this, magic. So I tried to get into mechanical keyboards. I bought like an entry level one.

Yeah. But turns out you have to like, I type like a spider. Like I'm not very disciplined at all. And it feels like you need to be disciplined with a mechanical keyboard. There's a learning curve. For sure. Which is not my vibe. So yeah.

So this is going to be a disaster. All right, here we go. I'm ready. which is not my vibe. So yeah, so this is going to be a disaster. All right, here we go. I'm ready. I might be good with one and done.

Wow. I'm 4.973 seconds, which is, you know, that's like... You were going so humble before. Did you see me? I was looking at the keys. I'm just, I'm a wreck here. This is not... If you want to be one and done, I'll tell you right now, it's a pretty good spot on the leaderboard okay i'll take it that's far yeah that's faster than i ever ran four point you said frisbee i'll tell you that he said 4.9

uh 4.973 for your own closure send me that that would put you right behind me at number three on the leaderboard oh well look at that. Now you're saying that. All time, all time great. Josh strikes again with another hit. That is perfect. Yeah, no, we'll leave it. We'll leave it there. Of course, I'll say, you know, I got close to Marquez,

but didn't quite get there. I think that's a pretty solid one. Josh, thanks for spending the time. I know you're a busy guy, but I appreciate you joining me, answering my world of questions and my morbid curiosity so uh best of luck with the future and hopefully we get to talk again sometime thank you thank you thanks for having me on this was great appreciate it take care all right thanks again to Josh for joining us that was a fantastic conversation

Andrew are you going to keep playing how long do you think you're going to keep playing wordle he said there's like 2500 words I mean I've always said what's so great about it is that it's just one word and it's just so simple and like it takes up so little of my time i've played the other ones like where you get to do a bunch of them and if that's what wordle was i don't think any of us would be playing anymore because you'd all be burnt out after the one day of super i think that's key we talked about half life i think the half life of Wordle was extended dramatically because you only spend a small amount of time

playing each day. If you went through a ton of words in a two-week period, the Half-Life would be a quick burn. This one, I think it's got legs

for a little while longer. I don't see why I would stop playing it. I can always find that amount of time in my day to do it. Love it. It's super worth it, yeah.

Thanks again to Josh for making it and congrats again to him for selling it to New York Times where the inspiration come from. Let me know what you guys want to know about S21 or S22,

of course. That's the number one thing to let us know in the comments section. But also, I feel like we're on a pretty good kick of finding good guests

that are either creative or just ultimate connected in some way and anyway. That's also a nice bonus. I mean, it was cool that you didn't mention that I played ultimate too but you know i felt like that was a given a lot of people knew that was it well now they know well that's why uh you're on a guest on every podcast there we go there it is play ultimate get on get on way for him that's the

that's the formula all right that's been it catch you guys next week see you later peace waveform was produced by adam alina we are partnered with Vox Media and our intro outro music was created by Vainsell and, and one more thing, this beautiful Waveform mug can be bought at shop.mkbhd.com. Thank you very much. Bye.