I produced a list of, you know, the thousand most common words sort of drawn from a bunch of different sources

and then tried to label all the parts of the rocket using only those words.

You know, instead of like liquid oxygen tank, I had to label it like

this large bag holds cold air for burning to make it go.

Graham or girl here, I'm a neon fogearty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, roles and cool stuff.

And today we definitely have cool stuff because I'm talking with Randall Monroe of XKCD fame and what if fame?

So Randall has a degree in physics before starting XKCD. He worked on robots at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia.

He started drawing stick figure comics that you've probably seen in his school notebooks and eventually scanned them

and put the digital versions on a website and it took off around 2006, 2007, around the same time Graham or girl started actually.

And I remember putting the affect effect comic on that page on my website way back then because they are generously available with a creative commons license.

Since then Randall has written multiple books including the best sellers, what if serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions,

how to which uses math and science to find the worst possible solutions to everyday problems,

thing explainer that only uses the thousand most common words to explain different scientific devices and now what if two just in time for the holidays.

Thanks so much for being with me here Randall.

Hey, thanks for having me.

You bet. So I'm just so excited and I'm sure all my listeners are too.

We'll start with an absolute softball question. I'm sure you get asked this all the time.

But Jay McCracken on Twitter wants to know how you pronounce X K C D or where it comes from.

You've got it right there. It's X K C D. I actually spent a lot of time trying to pick out four letters that would be clear that they didn't have an obvious pronunciation.

So that people would not try to read it as a word.

And it's a little bit like a string of random letters as possible. And that's actually sort of hard to do because if you pull a random string of four letters, you'll often be like, oh, that looks a little bit like it's trying to be this word or you know,

...