Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: the show Ridiculous Historians. Shout out to our super producer,
Speaker 1: mister Max Williams. You're Noel Brown. I've Ben Bollen.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: This is part two of an amazing conversation we have
Speaker 1: had with the puzzler himself, the legendary author AJ Jacobs.
Speaker 4: Too cool, and I just have to say, uh, I
Speaker 4: just I couldn't even bring it upon myself to believe
Speaker 4: that he really is a fan of the show, but
Speaker 4: he's dropping so many deep cuts from like episodes that
Speaker 4: we forgot we even did. It turns out it's actually
Speaker 4: the case. And I think we're both beyond flatter because
Speaker 4: we're huge fans of AJ's work as well. And this
Speaker 4: conversation went all kinds of fun places, and I think
Speaker 4: we can probably just join it already in progress.
Speaker 1: What are some of the I don't know. We talked
Speaker 1: about the sociological sort of milieu or environment within which
Speaker 1: these crazes, good and bad grow. Right, puzzles can become
Speaker 1: incredibly popular, which hunts happen historically, right when people are
Speaker 1: looking for some sort of escape, some sort of cause
Speaker 1: that they can blame and maybe we go back to
Speaker 1: something you mentioned with jigsaws and the Great Depression, because
Speaker 1: at first plance, honestly, it sounds like jigsaws might be
Speaker 1: a difficult thing for people in the depression. Money is tight.
Speaker 1: You have to buy the puzzle, right you can't. I
Speaker 1: guess you could rent a jigsaw. That's good.
Speaker 5: There were jigsaw libraries during the Depression. Yeah, really, yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 5: just to back up, jigsaws were invented in seventeen sixty
Speaker 5: by this British map maker named John Spillsbury. They called
Speaker 5: them dissected maps, and they were meant to be a
Speaker 5: learning tool. So the idea was, you know, you get
Speaker 5: your young British aristocrats and they like, here's the country
Speaker 5: that you should colonize and plunder, and you know that
Speaker 5: teach them how to carve up the world early on.
Speaker 5: And but it really caught on in the Great Depression
Speaker 5: for a couple of reasons. Partly, like you said, people
Speaker 5: needed a distraction, and you know, movies were huge and
Speaker 5: jigsaws were huge. Also technology. They originally jigsaws were made
Speaker 5: with a jigsaw. They were made out of wood carving.
Speaker 1: With a jigsaw.
Speaker 5: But then they invented this cookie cutter like machine that
Speaker 5: could chop down on cardboard and make them really quickly
Speaker 5: mass produced. So during the depression you had these weekly
Speaker 5: dime jigsaw puzzles and people would line up like a
Speaker 5: I don't know whatever, people line up for now Billie
Speaker 5: Eilish concert and so and and as with all the
Speaker 5: other puzzle crazes, you had moral panic. You had a
Speaker 5: preacher who said Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, and
Speaker 5: we will go down in history as the nation who
Speaker 5: worked jigsaw puzzles while our country was falling to ruins.
Speaker 3: And amazing armists.
Speaker 5: Yes, no, it did not fall to.
Speaker 1: No, I'm inverted. I'm into it now.
Speaker 4: Isn't Nero The idea of neuro fiddling while Rome burns?
Speaker 4: Almost akin to let them eat cake?
Speaker 3: Like? It's just sort of like a myth, that.
Speaker 1: Right, I don't know that.
Speaker 5: I can't remember whether, I don't think well.
Speaker 1: The problem with the leaders of the ancient past, whether
Speaker 1: they be whether they be Roman emperors or whether they
Speaker 1: be Catholic popes, is that the history gets written after
Speaker 1: their death, usually by a guy who is terrified of
Speaker 1: upsetting the current ruler. They'll say, okay, that guy was terrible,
Speaker 1: and you know, usually there's a lot of truth to that,
Speaker 1: but then they'll lean in hard so that they don't
Speaker 1: get executed.
Speaker 3: Excellent point.
Speaker 5: Excellent point. And there was even a split in the
Speaker 5: in the jigsaw community during the depression between sort of
Speaker 5: the rich and the poor, the powerful and because the
Speaker 5: rich and there still are these these fancy artisanal wooden
Speaker 5: jigsaw puzzles that you can pay thousands of dollars for
Speaker 5: in their hand carved and one of the famous ones
Speaker 5: during the depression was called par Puzzles. And here's a
Speaker 5: this is a fun I would maybe not so fun fact,
Speaker 5: but they had all of these high end ones have
Speaker 5: a they have a signature piece, like a shape that
Speaker 5: is in every puzzle. And the shape that Par went
Speaker 5: with in the thirties was a swastika. Oh boy, and
Speaker 5: that turned out to be not a great choice, so
Speaker 5: they had to switch to a seahorse.
Speaker 1: Uh horses here, yeah, sea horse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we did.
Speaker 4: We did an episode. We did an episode on I
Speaker 4: believe it was just weird dental stuff and there was
Speaker 4: a material that dentures were once made. It was referred
Speaker 4: to as seahorse teeth, which when you read it on paper,
Speaker 4: it just seems beyond ridiculous because seahors are so small
Speaker 4: do they even have teeth? But what it was referring
Speaker 4: to actually was hippopotamus teeth. They're referring to them as
Speaker 4: sea horses is a delightful misnomer.
Speaker 5: I heard that on this very show, thank you. And
Speaker 5: also I made me think because hippoponamous. I do believe
Speaker 5: hippo is horse and us river horse is what it
Speaker 5: translates to, and it's not that far off. Also, if
Speaker 5: you're around a hippopotamus, leave they are the most dangerous
Speaker 5: Uh that is not a yeah, the most dangerous land mammal. Right,
Speaker 5: shout out to the Mosquitos for most dangerous animal or humans?
Speaker 5: Moving on, So so okay, so there are these, there
Speaker 5: are these bespoke. There's a spectrum of jigsaws there, right,
Speaker 5: the mass produced ones, and then there's this upper echelon
Speaker 5: of bespoke hand carved you know, hardwood what have used.
Speaker 5: And those are probably the ones that the aristocrats are
Speaker 5: still buying, right yeah, and they had. I mean, there's
Speaker 5: a wonderful company if you can afford it, which I can't.
Speaker 5: I is called Stave and They're in Vermont and they
Speaker 5: make these wooden puzzles. Everyone is different, and they have
Speaker 5: people just carving them in what looks like a huge
Speaker 5: sewing machine. And Bill Gates is a is a client,
Speaker 5: and and they're called they're thousands of dollars like they are,
Speaker 5: you know, they can go up to ten thousand dollars,
Speaker 5: and they're super tricky. The guy who founded them calls
Speaker 5: himself the tormentor in chief because he'll have puzzles that
Speaker 5: they don't. They they look like edge pieces, but they're not.
Speaker 1: They don't.
Speaker 5: They have holes in the middle of the puzzle. They
Speaker 5: have pieces from other puzzles intentionally stuck in that don't
Speaker 5: fit at all, just to mess with your mind.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at just for reference, ridiculous historians. I am
Speaker 1: looking at Steve puzzles dot Com too. I am looking
Speaker 1: at their Honuka puzzle right now. It is two hundred pieces.
Speaker 1: It is two thousand, three hundred and ninety five dollars,
Speaker 1: and just from the picture it looks kind of simple.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at and I'm thinking, well, I could knock
Speaker 1: this one out.
Speaker 3: Got some neat depth to them.
Speaker 4: But I will say based on the hell the whole
Speaker 4: idea of puzzle ending libraries. They have a rental program
Speaker 4: and a timeshare program for their puzzles, so that's how
Speaker 4: you know. Then they have a whole page that descript
Speaker 4: that explains the difference, so hilarious.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the I mean they I hope they're not
Speaker 5: listening because they for the book, they lent me like
Speaker 5: five beautiful puzzles, oh wow. And I just have not
Speaker 5: had a chance to return them, but I will, but
Speaker 5: I will stay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as long as you eventually return it, it's fine, right,
Speaker 1: And yeah, I have been borrowing a.
Speaker 3: I think the statutes passed.
Speaker 1: I've been borrowing a uh uh encyclopedia from my high
Speaker 1: school for quite some time now, but I will return
Speaker 1: it at one point when I am done reading it.
Speaker 4: I don't know if they I think the internet has
Speaker 4: sort of replaced the encyclopedia sold door to door and
Speaker 4: they were very I.
Speaker 1: Had. I've got an unabridged dictionary, not encyclopedia because that
Speaker 1: would be in a set, right. But and that's that's
Speaker 1: kind of a puzzle too when you think about it,
Speaker 1: I like what I guess it goes to what we
Speaker 1: define as a puzzle, and you know, you talked briefly
Speaker 1: about the Rubik's cube, which I don't know about you, nol,
Speaker 1: but those are still pretty baffling to me. I could
Speaker 1: work through it, but I'm constantly befuddled and baffled by
Speaker 1: those speed cubers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then there's there's even more elaborate versions and
Speaker 4: shapes and sort of like hex like three dimensional sort
Speaker 4: of hex hexagonal versions or whatever. But whenever I think
Speaker 4: of these three dimensional puzzles, I don't know about you guys,
Speaker 4: in my mind always goes back to the lament configuration
Speaker 4: from Clive Parker Hell Raiser movies. And I'm a little
Speaker 4: suspicious of these because I'm always afraid they're going to
Speaker 4: summon these demonic, you know, snm.
Speaker 3: Creatures from Hell. But I don't know about you.
Speaker 4: Tell us about three D puzzles and some of these
Speaker 4: like what's what's the fifteen puzzle? And believe there was
Speaker 4: a bit of a scandal involved in that one too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this was actually this was a spatial puzzle that
Speaker 5: of This was sort of the Rubis cube of his time,
Speaker 5: the eighteen eighties, and it was called you've actually I'm
Speaker 5: sure seen it. It's the little square with fifteen tiles
Speaker 5: and an empty space, and you have to rearra it's
Speaker 5: the tile.
Speaker 3: So it's like a cracker bear.
Speaker 1: I've got several yes, like a cracker BEARA.
Speaker 5: This was huge in the eighteen eighties. And again it
Speaker 5: was like a New York Times called a pestilence on
Speaker 5: our society and uh, and it was invented by a
Speaker 5: postal worker. But the main character in this craze was
Speaker 5: a huckster. He was like this, this hooxter, a huckster
Speaker 5: named Sam Lloyd.
Speaker 1: Next do we get some like huckster con man. This
Speaker 1: will sound great in post.
Speaker 5: So he claimed to have invented them, even though he didn't,
Speaker 5: and he sold millions of them, and he partly he
Speaker 5: did it by scamming America. He said that he would
Speaker 5: pay one thousand dollars, which in eighteen eighty now you
Speaker 5: know something, he said, anyone who can solve the fifteen
Speaker 5: puzzle from this particular starting arrangement will get a thousand dollars.
Speaker 5: But the catch was it was rigged. There are seven
Speaker 5: billion initial arrangements of the fifteen puzzle, and half of
Speaker 5: them can be solved and half mathematically just cannot be solved.
Speaker 5: So he put them in an impossible arrangement and just
Speaker 5: messed with people's minds and sold millions of them, and
Speaker 5: that one sort of died out. It's not like crosswords
Speaker 5: are still big, but the fifteen puzzle it had a
Speaker 5: little resurgence when Bobby Fisher, the chess legend, slightly disturbed
Speaker 5: personality for him. There you go. Well, he was searching
Speaker 5: for himself, yes, for sanity. He was obsessed with him
Speaker 5: and solved speed solved one on the Johnny Carson Show
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy two and he like in seventeen seconds.
Speaker 5: So that chess and fifteen puzzles were Bobby Fisher's obsessions.
Speaker 1: And this is nuts because we can see, you know,
Speaker 1: Chess requires such a dare I say, myopic commitment into
Speaker 1: it that other puzzles, because Chess is a game that
Speaker 1: is also a puzzle, right, So I think when you
Speaker 1: get so deep into the world of chess, and I'm
Speaker 1: cartoonishly bad at that game, when you get so deep
Speaker 1: into it, then other puzzles seem kind of like elementary.
Speaker 1: It's like playing a really hard video game and then
Speaker 1: you go back to Solitaire and you're like, oh, I
Speaker 1: got this.
Speaker 3: It's a black eight, it's a red seven. Nailed it again.
Speaker 4: I guess it all comes down to something called game theory, right,
Speaker 4: and like, you know, a good puzzle, And to maybe
Speaker 4: a question I asked earlier, like what makes one of
Speaker 4: these really catch on? It needs to be difficult enough
Speaker 4: to be not so banging your head against a wall,
Speaker 4: but also difficult enough to like really feel like you
Speaker 4: have a challenge and that you've succeeded in some small
Speaker 4: way if you solve it. Can you just talk a
Speaker 4: little bit what you've run into in terms of game
Speaker 4: theory and like how that sort of intersects with these
Speaker 4: and to Ben's point, like how puzzles now kind of
Speaker 4: are in the realm of video games in a lot
Speaker 4: of ways.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, it's some of the greatest puzzles now or
Speaker 5: video games, which my kids always argue it is, like
Speaker 5: I'm not wasting time, I'm doing but the But like
Speaker 5: you said, there's a goldilock zone, Like it's very easy
Speaker 5: to make an impossible puzzle, uh, and it's also easy
Speaker 5: to make it too easy puzzle, so you want it
Speaker 5: just in the middle. And speaking of chess, there are
Speaker 5: what are called chess puzzles or chess problems where you
Speaker 5: set up the pieces in a certain way and you
Speaker 5: have to get to checkmate in you know, five moves.
Speaker 5: And I actually for the book, I interviewed Gary kasper
Speaker 5: Off and he he says, I'm not the best chess
Speaker 5: I am. I was the best chess player. But chess
Speaker 5: puzzles are different. It's a different skill. And he he said, like,
Speaker 5: there are crazy chess puzzles that not even the best
Speaker 5: chess puzzlers can do that require five hundred moves. You
Speaker 5: have to see five hundred moves in advance. The only
Speaker 5: only artificial intelligence can solve them. Only computers can solve these.
Speaker 5: So he but, but that speaks to that's not a
Speaker 5: fun puzzle unless you're ascension robot. Maybe you find enjoying
Speaker 5: a fun puzzle is right in there where it's like
Speaker 5: five moves and it's surprising. That's what it's like. You
Speaker 5: have to sacrifice your queen, something surprising and delightful. That
Speaker 5: to me makes a good puzzle.
Speaker 3: Got it?
Speaker 1: I think another good puzzle thing to this point, and
Speaker 1: this brings us to our next graze, which may be
Speaker 1: near and dear to some of our listeners. One of
Speaker 1: the other incredibly like tantalizing things about a good puzzle
Speaker 1: is you realize that if you shift your perspective right,
Speaker 1: if your mind is the piece that moves, then you
Speaker 1: will see the answer that has already been there the
Speaker 1: entirety of the time, Which brings us to the great
Speaker 1: obsession of nineteen eighties America amid a certain demographic and
Speaker 1: of course someone who will always be welcome at conventions
Speaker 1: and coseplay gatherings. We ask you, aj where is Waldo?
Speaker 5: Where is Waldo? Exactly? He is all over, at least
Speaker 5: in the eighties. And I loved researching the history of
Speaker 5: Where's Waldo? Because there's, first of all, there's a long
Speaker 5: history of artists hiding stuff in paintings. There's one Renaissance
Speaker 5: painter who's famous for hiding a pickled cucumber in all
Speaker 5: of his paintings. So I'm sure Freudians, Yes, Leonardo da
Speaker 5: Vinci also hid things in his paintings, not as much
Speaker 5: as Dan Brown claimed in the Da Vinci Code. You know,
Speaker 5: I don't think that the Last Supper is a secret
Speaker 5: clue that Jesus is a proud papa. But I do
Speaker 5: think that there are legitimate art historians who say there
Speaker 5: are easter eggs. But like in the Last Supper, if
Speaker 5: you look at the arrangement of the roles, the bread
Speaker 5: rolls on the table, it looks eerily like notes in
Speaker 5: a musical notes and people have played these notes and
Speaker 5: it's actually it's not bad. It sounds like So there
Speaker 5: was that.
Speaker 4: In fact, Da Vinci also hid actual penises in many
Speaker 4: of his paintings.
Speaker 5: So is that true in you can see Oh, I say, yeah,
Speaker 5: it wasn't so hard to find those. Yeah, well this, uh,
Speaker 5: speaking of that, I don't know what that segue means,
Speaker 5: doesn't Martin Martin Hanford is the British artist who probably
Speaker 5: has a penis, and he is the one who created
Speaker 5: the uh Where's Waldo? In nineteen eighty seven. God damn
Speaker 5: it so smooth. And he actually he had done a
Speaker 5: couple of Where's Waldo like paintings. He did a album
Speaker 5: cover for a group called the Vapors. I don't know,
Speaker 5: I had never heard of them.
Speaker 3: It was like a surf rock situation, perhaps, I don't know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and he uh, that was a little more adult.
Speaker 5: That was a scene, a crowd scene, and there was
Speaker 5: a secret sniper like with a rifle which would not
Speaker 5: go over with Where's Waldow? But he came out with
Speaker 5: Where's Waldow in nineteen eighty seven, and this, of course
Speaker 5: are these huge scenes and you have to find the
Speaker 5: little guy with the red and white striped sweater and
Speaker 5: the glasses. And it was a massive, you know, forty
Speaker 5: million copies sold all over the world. And there's actually
Speaker 5: the original was called Where's Wahlie? That's what it was
Speaker 5: called in Britain, and Waldo is the American one, and
Speaker 5: I have a couple of the foreign ones there is well,
Speaker 5: maybe you can guess where is the va isht water
Speaker 5: va Germany.
Speaker 3: I had to jump in real quick.
Speaker 2: The vapors are in English wave and power popping that
Speaker 2: exists initially existed between nineteen seventy eighty and nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 2: They had a hit song which was titled Turning Japanese, which.
Speaker 4: Oh, I really think so yes, the album covers neat.
Speaker 4: I mean, he really can see that Where's Waldo aesthetic?
Speaker 4: But it is like a crowd scene, but the center
Speaker 4: it's sort of on a grassy knoll situation, and they
Speaker 4: the figures are crowded around this like sort of like
Speaker 4: cadre of ambulances because it would appear that someone has
Speaker 4: been shot because you can't see in the top corner
Speaker 4: the waldou of this painting is in fact a sniper
Speaker 4: putting away his gun. But the center crowd it makes
Speaker 4: the shape of an eye, and like everything else above it,
Speaker 4: it's really cool. But yeah, and also on this article
Speaker 4: that I found on Unremembered History that shows this, it
Speaker 4: points out that he was really inspired by a lot
Speaker 4: of classical paintings that have these tableaus where there's like
Speaker 4: a city or a scene a village and there's all
Speaker 4: kinds of stuff going on, people doing all kinds of
Speaker 4: little things, and they're full of Easter eggs, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, there's some great Easter eggs like Hieronymous Bosh
Speaker 5: to it like it looks like and there I think
Speaker 5: there is theories that he was uh like tripping on
Speaker 5: some hallucinogen.
Speaker 3: That very very disturbing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was able to see some of those in
Speaker 1: person earlier this year, the Bosh pains, and they still
Speaker 1: don't let you photograph them, which I feels like kind
Speaker 1: of a rip to me, But I'm sure there are
Speaker 1: legitimate reasons. Museum restorationist and curators please understand that we've
Speaker 1: got your back. Uh, and we're we're not going to
Speaker 1: take pictures any longer where we are not supposed to,
Speaker 1: because let me tell you I had to Uh, I
Speaker 1: had learn I had to learn a language pretty quickly
Speaker 1: with that museum curator when I got when I got
Speaker 1: caught snapping and snitching with my iPhone, which which takes
Speaker 1: us to an other things. So, so where's Waldo? The
Speaker 1: answer is around the world, but he's using different identities.
Speaker 5: Is that there's Finn horrid Ga. Fien horrid Ga is uh, what's.
Speaker 3: That Finland perhaps or somewhere in.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But can I give you my favorite where's Waldo?
Speaker 5: Fact is that it has been consistently on the American
Speaker 5: Library Association's list of most banned books. And I researched this,
Speaker 5: and this is not apocryphal. This is because in one
Speaker 5: beach scene in one of his books, there's a small
Speaker 5: illustration of a woman and she's not wearing a bikini top,
Speaker 5: and some mothers got really upset and and you can't
Speaker 5: even see like there's there's no actual nipple. You can
Speaker 5: sort of see a side boom, but because she's lying
Speaker 5: face down. But it was enough to get banned in
Speaker 5: several states and make this list, and the publisher had
Speaker 5: to do like an emergency version with a like a
Speaker 5: new bikini top.
Speaker 1: A collector's and wait till the New York Times finds
Speaker 1: out about this. I think we're due for another moral panic.
Speaker 4: You know, it's interesting that the aesthetic of Where's Walla though,
Speaker 4: to me, is very European, Like just the whole vibe
Speaker 4: of it feels like a book that would be popular
Speaker 4: in Europe, and you know, they are much more open
Speaker 4: about nudity and little things and this, you know, a
Speaker 4: nude sunbather is something that you that would be a
Speaker 4: normal thing to see in a beach scene. You can
Speaker 4: only do so many different things and have it be
Speaker 4: like super crowded. So it makes perfect sense that they
Speaker 4: were that he would have done that.
Speaker 5: But yeah, yeah, no one in England or in Germany
Speaker 5: was complaining exactly right.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, famously more chill, but I
Speaker 1: guess it depends on the era of time that we're
Speaker 1: referring to. So speaking of only having only so many things,
Speaker 1: we have made this a two parter and we have
Speaker 1: to we can't talk about every puzzle. Unfortunately, to learn more,
Speaker 1: you're going to have to read AJ's book, The Puzzler
Speaker 1: and tune into The Puzzler Podcast. But before we go,
Speaker 1: fellow ridiculous historians, there's one that I'm sure we've all
Speaker 1: been waiting for.
Speaker 3: I hope we have.
Speaker 4: I jumped the gun and set up the wrong thing
Speaker 4: when I was talking about the Lament configuration, which is
Speaker 4: sort of this hellish Rubik's cube. But this now we're
Speaker 4: here with the idea of three dimensional puzzles and specifically
Speaker 4: Rubi's cube being the craze. But that wasn't the only
Speaker 4: example of this type of thing, right.
Speaker 5: Right, right, Wait, can I just do one last visual puzzle,
Speaker 5: because yeah, it could be my favorite puzzle ever. It
Speaker 5: was a few years about three years ago, the Baltimore
Speaker 5: Sun printed one of those spot the Difference puzzles and
Speaker 5: it was two pictures. You know, you have to find
Speaker 5: the difference, and it was a kid brushing his teeth
Speaker 5: in his pajamas. And the next day, the best correction
Speaker 5: in newspaper history had said, we regret to inform you
Speaker 5: that those two pictures were actually identical.
Speaker 1: Amazy, I've always if you've always thought that, right, like
Speaker 1: if you're looking at a very difficult version of those
Speaker 1: you've always thought, Okay, this is a prank, so that
Speaker 1: actually feel.
Speaker 3: Like you're going insane. I feel like, yeah, it.
Speaker 5: Wasn't even April Fools. It was just they messed up
Speaker 5: and it was just can you imagine the human the
Speaker 5: hours of human wasted, you know, wasted.
Speaker 4: Like it's because you refused your mind refuses to accept
Speaker 4: that in the moment, you know, I'm just missing something.
Speaker 3: The power.
Speaker 1: I do have immense respect though, for that that hypothetical
Speaker 1: person who is in that rarefied cognitive air, the person
Speaker 1: who not only looked at this extensively but wrote to
Speaker 1: the Baltimore Sun and told them the picture was identical.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of self confidence.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 1: That is true.
Speaker 4: Kind of like the people that leave mean podcast reviews.
Speaker 4: You know, who are these people? And where do you
Speaker 4: get your chutzpah? But yeah, no, no, If we could, though,
Speaker 4: I would love to hear a little bit more about
Speaker 4: some of these kind of art object type puzzles. You know,
Speaker 4: I think they're like, I don't know, if you saw
Speaker 4: the glass onion, the the you know, there was so many.
Speaker 3: Cool puzzles that were like these.
Speaker 4: You know, things, these like things that you interact with
Speaker 4: that were all crazy bespoke. But to me, in my mind,
Speaker 4: I always go back to the humble Rubik's cube. But
Speaker 4: that represents sort of a modernized, you know, plasticified eighties
Speaker 4: version of something that's very historic, you know, and that
Speaker 4: you would have seen in like the Dan Browns of
Speaker 4: the World's kind of writings.
Speaker 1: Totally like that.
Speaker 5: Well, well, let me give you a quick Rubik's cube
Speaker 5: and then we'll move to like sort of the advanced
Speaker 5: through excube.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, But.
Speaker 5: The Rubik's cube was invented by Erno Rubik. He was
Speaker 5: an architecture teacher in Hungary and he wanted to use
Speaker 5: it as a teaching tool. Now this makes me feel better.
Speaker 5: It took Erno Rubik himself one month to solve his
Speaker 5: own cube.
Speaker 3: Oh wow.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I only know that because years ago I
Speaker 1: wrote a show called The Stuff of Genius and we
Speaker 1: went and looked at inventors that the world. And that's
Speaker 1: one of the facts that that stuck with me. First off,
Speaker 1: I love it when an invention is named after the
Speaker 1: guy who actually invented it, you know what I mean. Rice,
Speaker 1: And I also love just to get this part in.
Speaker 1: I also love that that fact that he created something
Speaker 1: he didn't understand. It reminds me a little bit of
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence.
Speaker 4: I was going to ask, I mean, it seems to
Speaker 4: me that, you know, I would assume that anyone that's
Speaker 4: creating a puzzle or and designing a game that they're selling,
Speaker 4: what's the process for that? Like, I would imagine that
Speaker 4: a lot of cases you're working backwards from the solution.
Speaker 4: But this is a great example of how maybe that's
Speaker 4: not always the case.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: He writes about it in his autobiography, and I actually
Speaker 5: found it very inspiring. He talks about how he packed
Speaker 5: his room with all sorts of just random crap so
Speaker 5: like safety pins and buttons and crayons, and it was
Speaker 5: like a little playground for his mind. And from that
Speaker 5: he eventually came up with the rubric cube that he
Speaker 5: couldn't solve. And actually it was very hard to sell
Speaker 5: it to a toy company because they were a lot
Speaker 5: of this is too hard, no one's gonna want to
Speaker 5: do this. And finally he sold it to the Ideal
Speaker 5: Toy Company and they you know, as you know, it
Speaker 5: just became a phenomenon. There have been about a half
Speaker 5: a billion of them sold by some estimate. It just
Speaker 5: a lot of Rubik's Cubes at the height. In the eighties,
Speaker 5: there was a Saturday Morning cartoon of a flying crime
Speaker 5: solving Rubik's Cube. We have a theme song by Menudo.
Speaker 3: Cocaine was a hell of a drug, my friend.
Speaker 1: Finally, finally the theme song from Minudo, which is the stamp
Speaker 1: of authenticity exactly.
Speaker 4: There was there was a video game in the early
Speaker 4: nineties that starred the red Dot that was the logo
Speaker 4: for Sprite, and it wore sunglasses and just bounced around
Speaker 4: and did stuff. So there was a golden age of
Speaker 4: anthropomorphizing anything.
Speaker 1: And Achester that she'tah had a game at some point,
Speaker 1: but that was more nineties. And this this, uh, this
Speaker 1: is fascinating too because you would pointed out to us
Speaker 1: that all the weeks called the Rubik's cube. Today it
Speaker 1: had a different name, right, well, it.
Speaker 5: Had all sorts of I mean, before they went with
Speaker 5: the Rubik's Cube, they were thinking the Gordian Knott, the
Speaker 5: Inca gold, the Hungarian cube. But Rubik is such a
Speaker 5: great word and it kind of rhymes with cube, and
Speaker 5: it worked. It took off and it became a phenomenon.
Speaker 5: And what's funny is I interviewed all of these like
Speaker 5: old school nineteen eighties champions and first of all you vets, yeah,
Speaker 5: the old style. And I mean it's kind of sad
Speaker 5: because their records. They were all proud, like they got
Speaker 5: twenty three seconds and they were like, yeah, that was
Speaker 5: the first world record was about twenty three seconds, and
Speaker 5: now the world record is three point four to seven seconds.
Speaker 1: Oh that's insane. Because you can see these videos on
Speaker 1: YouTube right from these they're much more frequent than annual. Now.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's an annual Worlds competition, but there are
Speaker 1: a lot of regional things. These guys do it like
Speaker 1: one handed blind fold. Yeah, they look away or they
Speaker 1: put it behind their back. It's just this with their feet.
Speaker 3: That was I.
Speaker 5: Met the the North American world record holder for the footsto.
Speaker 3: For the footstof.
Speaker 4: Is there is there a standard like the way you
Speaker 4: have like in gambling, someone takes calipers to your dice
Speaker 4: and make sure it's regulation, like obviously it's it's evolved,
Speaker 4: you know, there's I think they're the gears are a
Speaker 4: lot smoother now, you know, that's probably partially why the
Speaker 4: times have been so you know, decreased.
Speaker 3: But can you talk talk a little bit about like
Speaker 3: what what what are.
Speaker 4: These standards for competitive play in the modern day Rubik's
Speaker 4: Cube world.
Speaker 5: Well, it is hilarious because you talk to the old
Speaker 5: timers and they have a grudge because, like you say,
Speaker 5: it's much smoother. There are little magnets are allowed so
Speaker 5: that it clicks into place. There's cube lube. You can
Speaker 5: get lots of different like brands of cube lube and
Speaker 5: uh and lub up your your erubics. But yeah, of
Speaker 5: course they're definitely it has to be mixed up in
Speaker 5: a certain way. But there is a little bit of
Speaker 5: luck involved because it could be mixed up in a
Speaker 5: way that it only needs like you know, fourteen turns
Speaker 5: or whatever.
Speaker 1: It lends itself to the algorithm, right.
Speaker 5: Right, and these these kids and mostly kids memorize hundreds
Speaker 5: thousands of algorithms because I did it, but I did
Speaker 5: the easy way, Like there's one algorithm for for people
Speaker 5: like me.
Speaker 1: But that'll eventually get Yeah, yeah, you say.
Speaker 4: Algorithm, Like I guess maybe i'm sort of maybe miss
Speaker 4: not not thinking about that term correctly. But is that
Speaker 4: just numbers of configurations and possibilities or what can you
Speaker 4: talk a little bit more about what algorithm means when
Speaker 4: it comes to solving a Rubic's cube.
Speaker 5: Sure, in the in the cubing community, as it's called,
Speaker 5: it's it's basically a series of moves. So it's twist right,
Speaker 5: twist up, twist down, twist left, and that is an algorithm.
Speaker 5: So if you have a certain arrangement, then you're going
Speaker 5: to have to do an algorithm. And by memorizing these
Speaker 5: hundreds of different ones, you can figure out the fastest algorithm.
Speaker 3: Through them by process of elimination almost kind of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's kind of like when you read the
Speaker 1: notation for it, uh, it gets to the point where
Speaker 1: it's similar to seeing chess notations. This is how you
Speaker 1: do this, and it's it's more confusing than actually getting
Speaker 1: there and just playing with the cube spatially. But I'm
Speaker 1: like you, aj, I had to I had to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the one I understand, right, and this this will
Speaker 1: be my afternoon and this this craze takes over because
Speaker 1: it follows some of the same things we've learned that
Speaker 1: make puzzles historically fascinating. Right, you do have a feeling
Speaker 1: of progress. I think that's one thing we have to
Speaker 1: have to make. We do have the feeling of an
Speaker 1: answer being right in front of us, but we're part
Speaker 1: of the puzzle and we simply need to shift the
Speaker 1: blocks of our perspective. Going a little far on that one.
Speaker 1: But but but as as you were saying, uh, this
Speaker 1: is it has maybe not reached the older heights of
Speaker 1: its original craze, but it's still very much a global thing, right.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, Well it had a second life with YouTube
Speaker 5: because and again the old people are like, we had
Speaker 5: to figure out ourselves. We didn't have YouTube tutorials. But
Speaker 5: but yeah, these YouTube and like you said, people who
Speaker 5: juggle them and do them underwater.
Speaker 1: You know it is.
Speaker 5: It is pretty a wonderfully visual medium. And also, like
Speaker 5: Noel said, it's become artisanal. Like now people are making
Speaker 5: their own cubes that are not just cubes that got
Speaker 5: twelve sides that like, you know, one in the shape
Speaker 5: of Michael Jordan I saw rights and uh, and so
Speaker 5: people have with three D printing. They've just become it's
Speaker 5: like a golden age for what they're called twisty puzzles,
Speaker 5: puzzles and and Noel brought up that it's not just
Speaker 5: these twisty puzzles. This is a long tradition of three
Speaker 5: D puzzles.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 5: And for the most famous are puzzle boxes, which is
Speaker 5: isn't that the hell Raiser.
Speaker 4: That configuration baby from your hell bounds heart?
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, that's right, let's read it.
Speaker 4: Can I just ad a really quick gripe and then
Speaker 4: I'll let you continue. I I sometimes fall a victim
Speaker 4: to Instagram ads for products, it seems to Alex speaking
Speaker 4: of algorithms, and I saw this would looked to be
Speaker 4: a completely workable, manipulatable uh puzzle box hell Raiser, And
Speaker 4: I ordered it and it came in and the thing
Speaker 4: as solid as a rock, didn't have a single articulating part.
Speaker 4: It still looks really cool. But man, I'm that video.
Speaker 4: It was like, ooh, I want to summon those demons.
Speaker 4: But yeah, the puzzle box, right, let's let's.
Speaker 3: Let's go on. Yeah.
Speaker 5: The most famous ones are are Japanese puzzle boxes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've got a few of those, you do, I've
Speaker 1: got Well, I've got like the low end version.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, it's super expensive. They can be thousands, like
Speaker 5: fifty thousand dollars for like the really high end ones.
Speaker 4: No, like like the box that everyone gets at the
Speaker 4: beginning of Glass Onion, for example, to be invited to
Speaker 4: this you know, get away meeting of the mines at
Speaker 4: the the you know, the Billionaire's Island. Everyone gets this
Speaker 4: crazy box that has to be solved in various ways,
Speaker 4: and then certain sides of it flip open and then
Speaker 4: you twist things and within it is a clue or whatever.
Speaker 5: Right, And the traditional one is the Japanese one made
Speaker 5: of wood, and you slide some panels and you have
Speaker 5: to slide them in a certain direction and you open
Speaker 5: it up. Usually there's nothing in it, and sometimes an
Speaker 5: invitation to an island party, but usually it's just like
Speaker 5: I want to open this up. And and they've gotten
Speaker 5: so elaborate. There's this guy who does them on YouTube
Speaker 5: and gets millions of hits because he does them live
Speaker 5: and you get to see him curse and sweat and
Speaker 5: throw things around. And I can't remember his name right now,
Speaker 5: maybe Max knows it, but he but but these things
Speaker 5: are works of art. They're quite beautiful, and the best
Speaker 5: of them, like it's not just sliding, they get really creative.
Speaker 5: So you have to spin them. One one you have
Speaker 5: to freeze because I don't know it releases something. One
Speaker 5: guy complained. He told me he ordered a puzzle box
Speaker 5: in December to Massachusetts and it came solved because it
Speaker 5: was all about freezing. Uh and it was already frosy
Speaker 5: like rip off. But yeah, these things are there are
Speaker 5: extraordinary and I talked to the the people who do them,
Speaker 5: and one of my favorites was this guy named Kagan
Speaker 5: Sound who's in Colorado and he made one for the
Speaker 5: movie director. What's the name of the guy who did
Speaker 5: He did the whale he did uh Oh, he made
Speaker 5: a desk for Darren Aronofsky that it was like an
Speaker 5: Aroonofsky film. It took this guy four years to do
Speaker 5: it and he said he lost all of his friends.
Speaker 5: He just stayed in his workshop going insane. But it's amazing.
Speaker 5: It's got all of these puzzles. I mean, it's not
Speaker 5: great if you want to get a stapler out because like.
Speaker 4: You well, yes, but it really reminds me of Aeronowsky's
Speaker 4: first film, Pie, which is all about, like you know,
Speaker 4: just digging into the secrets of the universe until you
Speaker 4: go completely mad.
Speaker 1: Fantastic slapstick comedy, especially for the holidays.
Speaker 3: Watch with your children, So maybe do a double feature
Speaker 3: with Requiem for a Dream.
Speaker 1: The best best blind date I ever went on was
Speaker 1: going to see a blind double date see Requiem for
Speaker 1: a Dream. And we were running late, so we got
Speaker 1: dinner after. It was a very surreal moment at Applebee's
Speaker 1: that evening. But with all this, you know, this is
Speaker 1: just the beginning of the story. The world of puzzles
Speaker 1: is wide and vast, and I think it's not hyperbolic
Speaker 1: to say that as long as human hardware works the
Speaker 1: way it does, puzzles will continue to rate and proliferate
Speaker 1: in the future. And you know, we're a ridiculous history show.
Speaker 1: But Aja, I think we have to ask you here
Speaker 1: at the end of the week, what do you do?
Speaker 1: What do you think the future of puzzles is? Is
Speaker 1: there a world where it's just AI making puzzles for
Speaker 1: each other they just solve those?
Speaker 5: Well, I think I mean AI can be used to
Speaker 5: make puzzles that are interesting and creative. I'm hoping that
Speaker 5: we can collaborate with AI and that they won't take
Speaker 5: over all the puzzle making themselves. And in fact, on
Speaker 5: the Puzzler Show, we have like an AI. It's called
Speaker 5: like what guess the g chat GPT prompt, So we
Speaker 5: give you what chat GPT said and you have to guess.
Speaker 5: But I do think we are still in the golden
Speaker 5: age of puzzles, Like there are so many people now
Speaker 5: doing so much creative work in puzzles that I'm optimistic.
Speaker 5: And again, like you know, I'm an evangelist, so I
Speaker 5: don't think it's I don't agree with the New York
Speaker 5: Times that it's the end of civilization and that is
Speaker 5: a waste of time and we're going to ignore our kids.
Speaker 5: I think it's actually at its best, it's like community building.
Speaker 5: Like the I saw the guy work Josh Wirdle w A. R.
Speaker 5: D Ellie, who he invented wordle, and I saw him
Speaker 5: speak at the Crossword Puzzle convention and he his argument is, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's it brings people together. Like it's a very almost
Speaker 5: you know, like Kumbaya message. He talked about he gets
Speaker 5: letters from a gay man who reconciled with his conservative
Speaker 5: Christian mother by doing wordle.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 5: Yes, these nice little stories about puzzles bring us together.
Speaker 4: That's funny too because they are somewhat ideologically agnostic kind
Speaker 4: of you know, there is a certain common ground to
Speaker 4: them where you're sort of just trying to solve a goal.
Speaker 4: And I'm surely there are themed puzzles that you know,
Speaker 4: could have some sort of whatever leaning, But in general,
Speaker 4: wouldn't you say they are kind of like an even
Speaker 4: playing field in terms of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, And it depends on the type of puzzle, as
Speaker 5: you say, like you know, I think sudoku is is
Speaker 5: pretty even. There's It's been actually fascinating to watch the
Speaker 5: politics of crossword puzzles because there was a few years
Speaker 5: ago there was a movement a lot of crossword makers
Speaker 5: of color and women cross science. They sent a petition
Speaker 5: to the New York Times saying it was it was
Speaker 5: too white and male, the clues and the makers were
Speaker 5: too white and male. And they've actually changed, Like the
Speaker 5: New York Times, it had an impact. They hired some
Speaker 5: editors who were people of color. So so it depends
Speaker 5: on the type there are. It can get political, like everything,
Speaker 5: but it can also I do think that something like
Speaker 5: a puzzle box is uh is accessible to anyone.
Speaker 4: Well, and I just wanted to give you a quick
Speaker 4: recommendation since you have kids in your interest in video games,
Speaker 4: and it sounded like you, you know, think there is
Speaker 4: some potential and creativity and you know, puzzles in the
Speaker 4: video game realm. We are kind of a golden age
Speaker 4: of like indie game designs and like you know, with
Speaker 4: Steam and various you know, nine ten dollars games, you
Speaker 4: can get that they're out there, you know, to be had.
Speaker 4: There's a game called Cocoon that is a purely just
Speaker 4: puzzle game, but it's beautifully designed. It's incredibly interactive and
Speaker 4: kind of trippy, and I think you and your kids
Speaker 4: would really dig it.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 3: Do you guys?
Speaker 1: Remember Missed with a y it's got this actually has
Speaker 1: missed design, missed.
Speaker 3: Qualities to it, but it's Yes, what a cool game
Speaker 3: that was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you haven't played Missed, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: nice chill point and click And I'm with you, guys.
Speaker 1: I love games that are not you know, super high
Speaker 1: adrenaline busters. You know, they're just like, hey, let's lay
Speaker 1: back and investigate, point and click.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And with this, folks, we have to tell you we
Speaker 1: are calling it today, but please do go to your browser,
Speaker 1: your mobile thinga madjig of choice and point and click
Speaker 1: on the puzzler which is as you said, aja daily
Speaker 1: show coming out with such luminary guests such as michae
Speaker 1: Iam Black, Roywood Junior. I think our Palo Fia Eisenberg
Speaker 1: has been on there as well as.
Speaker 3: Gosh, it's a cavalcade of folks.
Speaker 1: We can't name them all, but we can tell you
Speaker 1: each episode brings unique, new and fascinating puzzles with the
Speaker 1: world class expert on them. Aj Where can people learn
Speaker 1: more about your work because you've done much much more
Speaker 1: than just puzzled over our Yes.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, the other luminaries include Ben and
Speaker 5: soon to come know al So I'm very excited about that,
Speaker 5: And I mean, this is a dream. I love your podcast,
Speaker 5: so it is like it's very weird to be on
Speaker 5: a podcast you love.
Speaker 1: Thank you for not stopping at it's very weird.
Speaker 3: Very weird to do.
Speaker 4: I do just want to say though, we had intended
Speaker 4: to do two different topics, and I may have even
Speaker 4: set it up weirdly where I said that one of
Speaker 4: them was an intersection with a very recent episode that
Speaker 4: we did, and I hope that we can maybe even
Speaker 4: just go ahead and do it before the holidays, you know,
Speaker 4: get you back and do this other one that is
Speaker 4: sort of about puzzles and ciphers and all of this
Speaker 4: kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: Because this one.
Speaker 4: Ended up being more than we would normally fit into
Speaker 4: a single episode, so we just split it.
Speaker 3: But we'd love to get that one on the books.
Speaker 1: Too, all right, or at least January. Yeah, and at
Speaker 1: twenty three three, or we'll kick off twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: with more puzzles. No spoilers, folks, but the next time
Speaker 1: Aji returns, we're going to be talking about a particularly
Speaker 1: great game. Oh my gosh, that's too much. So thank
Speaker 1: you so much for tuning in, folks. Thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our super producer, mister Max Williams. Thanks to the
Speaker 1: one and only legendary author and now podcaster A. J.
Speaker 3: Jacobs, Noel who else.
Speaker 1: Oh you know what, We got to get Jonathan Strickland
Speaker 1: ak the Quizzer to get his act together.
Speaker 4: That's right, Twist and the Puzzler too much, too much now,
Speaker 4: but he's gonna wait.
Speaker 3: That's why we got to get him in before the
Speaker 3: end of the year. I know that he's in building
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, I can say his name too many times now.
Speaker 3: I'm glad that I'm not in the building.
Speaker 4: But We do want to thank though, Alex Williams, who
Speaker 4: in fact is Max's brother, who composed our theme which
Speaker 4: is definitely playing right now. Chris Frostiotis leaves Jeff Coates
Speaker 4: here in spirit.
Speaker 3: Ben, thank you a j well once again, thank you.
Speaker 4: It was an absolute pleasure and look forward to having
Speaker 4: you back soon and also getting in.
Speaker 3: That hot seat.
Speaker 5: Hell yeah, I can't wait.
Speaker 3: I can't wait.
Speaker 5: We'll be gentle, We'll be gentle.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it. Puzzle away, We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 4: For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.