Jason Snell explains on the Six Colors “About” page why Six Colors is called Six Colors. (“Back in the olden days, Apple’s logo featured a rainbow of six colors. Longtime Apple fans and employees used to say that if you cut them, they would ‘bleed six colors.’”)
John Gruber’s explained that the name for Daring Fireball traces back to his childhood obsession with stuntmen, particularly Evel Knievel.
Perhaps few have wondered why Lex on Tech is called “Lex On Tech.” It’s not (quite) as obvious as it may seem.
I name a lot of stuff after myself. It’s not strictly vanity and ego. There’s Lex.Games, Cryptograms by Lex.Games, LexShell, my podcast Your Daily Lex… Yeah. It sounds a bit obnoxious sometimes. That’s not my intent.
My intention is to win my name back.
Longtime followers of mine know the bane of my existence. I’ve spent 16+ years on the business side of podcasting, but there’s another guy with a very similar name to mine who is also a podcaster, and who — objectively — sucks. His name is one letter off from mine, but pronounced exactly like mine. He’s “Lex Fridman.”
Unsurprisingly, we get confused a lot. I get messages and emails intended for him. I have lost potential clients because they thought I was him. I’ve had people schedule calls with me and then be disappointed that I’m not him. I’ve been invited to conferences to speak about AI; they want him. We’ve each been sent ads for the other guy’s podcast.
People confuse us enough that I’ve taken to sharing a link to a song I wrote explaining that I’m the Real Lex Friedman. It tends to get a good response.
The other Lex was made famous by Elon Musk; you can imagine how I feel about that. He’s a frequent guest of Joe Rogan’s (whom I loathe), and he’s welcomed Donald Trump on his show.
I used to be eminently Google-able; search my name, find my stuff. Alexi Fedotov, who now goes by Alexei or Lex Fridman (saying Fedotov, which he used to use as his last name, was in fact his mother’s maiden name), has ruined my Google-ability. Search Google for my name, it shows results for him. Search DuckDuckGo for my name, it also shows the other guy.
Kagi fares better; the first two results and the sidebar box for the other dude. But the next results are all me. Bing also exists. (It has the same problem as Google and DuckDuckGo.)
So I keep naming stuff after me, and linking my name (Lex Friedman) back to me.
It is fair and reasonable that search engines link to the other guy if you search for him; it sucks that they do so if you search for me.
