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The Current Transcript for July 28, 2017

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

When I meet them, whether it's ISIS, al-Qaeda or the Taliban, they talk to me. They discuss foreign policy mainly and religion is something that comes later.

LAURA LYNCH: Souad Mekhennet goes where few others dare to go, meets with those who others dare to meet and comes out not only alive, but with gripping stories to tell. Mekhennet is a German journalist of Moroccan and Turkish descent who is determined to seek out those who embrace jihad and violence against the West. And she doesn't just question them. She challenges their views and actions. That's coming up. After that—

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Rubik’s Cube clicking]

So it’s like almost like reading music notation. You look at it and you say, “I have to turn the top this way and the right this way.” We have so many people that want to come and complete, but this room is just not big enough.

LL: What is this source of fascination and frustration? What fills a room with those so obsessed they compete to win with it? It is, of course, the Rubik’s Cube, and for more than four decades people have dared to try to solve its puzzle. Our guest has literally written a book on it. I'm Laura Lynch and this is the summer edition of The Current.

From the Taliban to ISIS, journalist faces jihadist leaders to understand their cause

Guest: Souad Mekhennet

SOUNDCLIP

Iraqi security forces completed the defeat of Daesh in Mosul. That was a crushing blow for Daesh. And that is being followed up here as you know in Syria, where the Syrian democratic forces are making excellent progress fighting their way into Raqqa. We always knew that fight would be tough. And of course it is. But they're making great progress and we should commend them for that. The liberation of Raqqa will be a really decisive blow to Daesh. It will complete the liberation of their so-called and self-proclaimed capital here in Syria and when combined with the liberation of Mosul, is fundamental to the defeat of Daesh.

LL: That was Robert Jones, Deputy Commander of the International Coalition Forces against the Islamic State speaking in Raqqa, Syria earlier this week, sounding an optimistic note about the chances for a military victory against ISIS—also known as Daesh—in Iraq and Syria. And so far he's being proven right, as US-backed forces have re-taken as much as half the city. But as terrorist attacks by ISIS supporters proliferate around the world, the official battle is only part of the story because despite victories on the battlefield, the key to defeating ISIS and its ideology is in understanding it and what animates its fighters. It's a gap in understanding that journalist Souad Mekhennet is determined to bridge. She talks to jihadists, and the people who recruit them, from the Taliban to Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And as an Arabic-speaking German of Moroccan and Turkish descent, she has gained access to extremist leaders few others in the West have spoken to, facing many dangers along the way. Souad Mekhennet is a national security correspondent for The Washington Post and the author most recently of I Was Told To Come Alone: My Journey Behind The Lines of Jihad. She joins us from Frankfurt, Germany. Hello.

SOUAD MEKHENNET: Hello, Laura.

LL: Now as someone who has talked to many jihadists and their leaders, as well as intelligence officials in the West, what have you been thinking as you watch what's been happening in Raqqa and Mosul?

SOUAD MEKHENNET: Well, first of all it is indeed of course very important that ISIS or Daesh is losing ground. However, this is not going to be the end of the ideology and that's something that I'm hearing when I speak to people from the group or who are sympathizers of the group. So we should not underestimate how much the ideology has spread. And if you take a look at what happened since the so-called caliphate was declared, Laura, you can see that ISIS has spread into different countries and areas. We see fights going on in the Philippines. You see ISIS also got a strong leg in North Africa. If we take a look at what's happening in Libya. So we should not—this shouldn't be an illusion where we believe that just because Raqqa is going to fall, that's going to be the end of ISIS or terrorism.

LL: And then there are also so-called lone wolf attacks.

SOUAD MEKHENNET: Yes, indeed.

LL: We have experienced some of this here.

SOUAD MEKHENNET: One Belgian law enforcement official you spoke to recently called lone wolf terrorists who support ISIS—and this is a quote—“low key losers.” What do you think of that assessment?

SOUAD MEKHENNET: He was referring to the recent attack of one of the so-called lone wolfs in Belgium where indeed, officials said they were lucky because if he would have been able to build this explosive device in the way the description wanted him to, this could have been really deadly for hundreds of people. And what he was referring to was also the background of this person. This person was “indeed a loser” if you look at the way he was not really capable of finding his way inside the society. However, this is not the typical, let's say, ISIS commander. And as you mentioned, I have interviewed some of those. And in one of the chapters, I describe a meeting with one of those high-level ISIS commanders and I can tell you, Laura that this ISIS commander for example, was somebody highly educated, who spoke several languages, was very interested in politics and who had studied engineering. He could have been somebody totally different but he chose to join the caliphate. So we should not underestimate also the kind of people and what they are capable of doing.

LL: Let's go back to your book and you begin by talking about how you grew up. As someone of Muslim descent who grew up in Germany, what led you to build a career around trying to understand what drives people to Islamic extremism?

SOUAD MEKHENNET: Well, in my case I think it was the especially the meeting I had with the wife of a 9/11 victim. Her husband died as a firefighter. Her name was Maureen Fanning and she said to us, to us journalists after a dinner, you know I also hold our politicians and our media accountable for what happened and you guys also to a certain extent responsible. And we looked at her and we said why? And she said because there was no person out there who told us that there are people in this world who are hating us so much. And if we would have known why they are hating us so much, maybe we could have done something to prevent this mass murder. And she looked at me in a certain way because I was also the only person in that group who was of a Muslim descent. And she asked why do they hate us so much? And I had no answer back then. And as a journalist but also somebody of Muslim descent, I felt a responsibility of trying to explain to people like her and others what's going on in the hearts and minds of those jihadists or their sympathizers. Because frankly speaking Laura, I believe that's the only way how we could all as societies find solutions in fighting extremism. It would be illusionist if we believe that the ideology or the reasons for hatred would disappear with the end of the so-called caliphate, Raqqa. So we should not underestimate it. As long as we are not talking about the reasons or as long as we don't tackle or find solutions for those reasons, this is going to go on and on. And if I may add one more thing, you know you played this very interesting quote of the commander. He congratulates the Iraqi army and so on. Yes, which of course I understand from the perspective of a military person. However, if you take a look at what kind of videos are now out there showing how the Iraqi army as well as Shia militias are committing horrific atrocities against people who they accuse of being Daesh. Whether they are really ISIS or not ISIS, that's a different question. But when I see videos where they show supposedly killed ISIS fighters whose hearts had been cut out then this worries me Laura, because in my book I Was Told to Come Alone, if you read certain chapters you will see that people who then joined al-Zarqawi or even ISIS accused us in the West of not looking at what kind of atrocities the Iraqi army or Shia militias have committed since 2003 in Iraq. And I mean, I guess you know where I'm going now. If we do the same and keep silent about what is supposedly happening in some parts of Iraq or Syria in the name of fighting ISIS, we will face another kind of radicalization wave in the next five years.

LL: And here you are. You have become the interlocutor, the person who moves between the groups trying to explain, hold to account on many sides. You've interviewed many jihadists and leaders within various Islamic extremist groups. You've already mentioned one interview. I'm wondering which one had the most, the deepest impact on you.

SOUAD MEKHENNET: You know there had been several, honestly speaking. I mean one of them is indeed the one with the ISIS commander because first of all, it was a very intense situation. I'm describing how we were driving alongside the Turkish-Syrian border region and I was not allowed to bring any recording device, no phone, no ID card. And this person, when the conversation grew much more intense, I saw his hand, his right hand moving toward his pocket where I believe he had a gun. And I understood that I had to stop asking him those tough questions because he grew very angry. And so after the interview and after I returned back to Europe, I found out who he was and I found out that he in fact was also one of the responsible commanders who oversaw the so-called Beatles, you know Jihadi John and others who killed some of my colleagues, who beheaded journalists in front of cameras. And this, you know, when I found out that I was in the car with this kind of person, it had of course a huge impact.

LL: And I've got to say reading your account of how you made it to this interview and how you dealt with it, it's like reading a thriller and you're taking great risks in doing this. But isn't something else that struck you about him the fact that he could have turned out to be more like you?

SOUAD MEKHENNET: Yes, indeed. He is somebody who was of a similar background, of North African, of indeed Moroccan background. In fact, he grew up actually much more privileged than I grew up. He came from a wealthier family, from a highly educated family. My parents were guest workers. So he would have had all the chances to be something, somebody totally different. And he grew up in Europe but he got radicalized in Europe. And I can unfortunately not tell you his real identity because I assume he's still alive and it was one of the agreements for the interview—that I would never reveal his true identity while he's still alive. And to me this was really, really another very shocking point that this person got drawn into this ideology of hatred and he had no sense for any wrongdoing. I mean you can see when you read the account in the book, how I challenged him about when he said, I asked him why are you coming to this country? This is not your country, right? And he had explanations and justifications for everything and anything and I could see that he was so stuck in his world and he had for everything an answer. But he at some stage also figured out that his answers were not good enough and then he became angry. And this is the moment where I told you, his hand moved toward his pocket and I understood I had to stop now because this was a couple of weeks after the so-called caliphate was declared and nobody had any idea about what those people wanted. And I believed it was important to tell the readers and the world who they are and what ideology they believed in. However, I stopped at the moment when he moved his hand toward his pocket because yes, I'm taking risks but I also still want to get out alive of those situations.

LL: You have your limits. But some of the other extremist group commanders have been much more willing to engage in arguments with you. I’m thinking of the Taliban commander you spoke to.

SOUAD MEKHENNET: Yes. Well, that was one of the other moments where I found myself in the car with this guy and his driver and his bodyguard slash assistant slash translator. We drove into the night outside of Karachi and I had no idea where we were going. And it turned out he wanted to invite me for a barbecue. So I ended up having this very spicy food with these three men. And when they served the food, he said okay, let's stop talking about politics. Let's talk about the real important stuff. And I was thinking what's coming next? And he was actually looking for his second wife. By the waym many others were also looking for a second wife and I understood this was the moment where I had to become a diplomat because he had already a vision for who his second wife should be and it was me. This is not really the type—let me put it this way—the type of husband my parents would wish for. Right? But we had a very interesting—and I think because I was able to turn him down but in a nice way and making him laugh actually because I told him, don't you think one wife is headache enough? And you know him and those other two guys, they started laughing. And because of that, because I think this was kind of like an ice breaker, I started challenging him. I spoke about women's rights, about why the Taliban would attack women with acid. And we had a very serious conversation but he was willing to answer all the questions and he didn't take it personal and it was a very, very interesting experience indeed.

LL: From the people you've spoken to, how would you explain what makes a young person take up the jihadist cause?

SOUAD MEKHENNET: There are different reasons depending on where the person comes from. So for example, if we talk about people in the Middle East, a lot of them believed that since 2003 the West had planned or was plotting to hand over Arab countries to Iran or to Shia militias. And they would always say look, you guys are telling us that you have a rule of law and human rights and so on. But since 2003, you guys—they also believe that I'm a member of the West of course—they would say the West has started a war against Iraq under the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. But where were the weapons of mass destructions? And of course they were none. So where were the consequences? Then they would tell you about Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib—all those places where torture happened—and would ask where are the consequences? So what they're doing is—and this is also by the way something I'm hearing from a lot of people in Western countries who decided to join those ideologies—where they say look, there is hypocrisy going on. So on one hand, we in the West pretend to be better, but on the other hand, where are the consequences? But in the Middle East especially, people have a deeply and absolute belief that we in the West are plotting to hand over Arab countries to Iran. That's number one. I would say in Europe, people who would join from European countries, it's a bit more complicated because often people start, there's an interest in Islam for various reasons. I describe how some of those who later ended up in the hands of ISIS recruiters were looking for something. They came from broken families and they felt that some groups or elements were giving them an alternative home. And this is how a recruiter works. They are looking for people who are disillusioned. They are looking for people who feel that they are alone, who are in a crisis for whatever reason. But they are also looking for people who are angry about any kinds of politics. And recruiters, they start to talk to them first. They engage with them. They invite them to have coffee, tea or whatsoever in different places. This is how everything starts.

LL: The West talks a lot about prompting democracy in the Middle East. How effective is that strategy?

SOUAD MEKHENNET: Well, if you look at what the outcome of the so-called Arab Spring was, it didn't really work out very well. We have to be aware that if we talk about democracy, it doesn't necessarily mean the same for everyone. And some people who I met in the Middle East, who were protesters and for example in Bahrain or in Egypt or in Libya. When I asked them what do you want, they would very often say yeah, we want democracy because somebody told them hey, if a journalist asks you what do you want, tell them democracy because especially those from the West, that's what they like to hear. But once you start challenging them a little bit more and you ask them critical questions and you look into who by the way is sending you, then you realize wait a second, that's not the same kind of democracy, at least the values are not the same that we are discussing, right? That we hold very dear to what we call democracy. For example, in the case of Bahrain, I figured out that a lot of those protesters were following what two clerics were telling them. And if I asked them so does democracy mean then that women would have more rights, that minorities would have the same rights as you have, you sometimes got some troubling answers. Right? It's not what we call democracy. So we should maybe focus more on values and not necessarily on system.

LL: And I wanted to ask you—this is often framed as a clash of civilization—Islam versus the West. How do you see that?

SOUAD MEKHENNET: No, I don't see it as a clash of civilizations. I believe this is a clash between people who want to build bridges and those who want to divide as societies. And we have those unfortunately in all kinds of religions and different fields of societies. You know, it's not Islam that is radicalizing people. Those people are radicalizing Islam. And I'm Muslim myself. I'm a descendant of the prophet. And there are millions of other Muslims who are like me, who are trying to build bridges. And that's one of the other reasons why I believe I decided to write the book because I think we all need to do more explaining and make sure we don't let those who want to divide us win.

LL: So much more to talk about and not enough time. I thank you for writing the book and for coming to talk to us about it.

SOUAD MEKHENNET: Thank you.

LL: Souad Mekhennet is a national security correspondent for The Washington Post and the author most recently of I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey behind the Lines of Jihad. She was in Frankfurt, Germany. Okay. We're going to take a moment now to go through some listener feedback on yesterday's show. Few segments in recent memory have divided our listeners the way this one did when we asked the all-important question: Does pineapple belong on pizza? On Facebook, Sue Vignola wrote: “Of course pineapple doesn't belong. Absolutely revolting,” to which Lowell Friesen replied: “You know, it's close-minded comments like this that create environments ripe for people like Trump to get elected. Do we really want that kind of deep dish problem north of the border, Sue?” And on Twitter, Theatre Passe Muraille tweeted at us to say: “We do pineapple and anchovies on our pizza. It's the ultimate power move.” Thanks to all of you who wrote in. You can always reach us on Facebook or Twitter @thecurrentcbc or on our website. Go to www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link.

[Music: “The Puzzle Song” – Shirley Ellis]

LL: The CBC News is next. And don't be a square, get cubing. The puzzling return of the Rubik's Cube and the quest to solve it in seconds flat. I'm Laura Lynch. This is the summer edition of The Current.

ENCORE | The Rubik's Cube's puzzling return in the digital age

Guests: Ian Scheffler

LL: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: Up next, time to dust off the old Rubik’s Cube.

SOUNDCLIP

There’s never been a puzzle quite like Rubik's Cube and America may never be the same. A medical journal has written about a unique phenomenon—a Rubik’s thumb. A museum recognized it as a work of art. Rubik's Cube has been involved in divorce proceedings. People are practicing at clinics, entering contests and competing across the country. Rubik’s Cube from Ideal—25 million Americans have made it a part of their lives. How about you?

AMT: Well, that's how the Rubik’s Cube fad sounded way back in 1980. The toy would go on to become one of the most popular in history and you may remember it yourself. The Rubik’s Cube was everywhere for a while—a source of unequal parts frustration and fun. But then, the Rubik's Cube seemed to disappear. Believe it or not, the colourful cubic puzzle though, is staging a comeback. There are a growing number of people who are borderline obsessed with what they call Cubing. A cube speed competition took place in Toronto last December. The Current’s Howard Goldenthal went to check it out.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Rubik’s Cube clicking]

DAVE CAMPBELL: My name’s Dave Campbell. I'm the director of canadianCUBING. We're here at the YMCA in downtown Toronto for our Toronto Limited, Fall 2016 speed cubing competition. We have so many people that want to come and compete that this room is just not big enough. So we’ve limited it to 170 competitors. This up here is the competition area. So you can see we have about 10, what we call, timing stations. So at it we’ll have a judge. There's the timer which starts and stops with the competitors’ hands. So what happens is that we have a scramble station behind it. The competitors bring their cubes up and our trusty scramblers scramble it according to a specified algorithm. So it's almost like reading like music notation. You look at it and say okay, I have to turn the top this way and the right this way. You come up with a set scramble that everyone will get for this round. At that point, the competitor goes down, sits and solves his cube. When he's done, he gets up and comes over here and we bring the cube back, that’s solved now, to get scrambled again. And they repeat that five times.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: What are your names?

COMPETITOR 1: Caden.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: How old are you?

COMPETITOR 1: Fourteen.

COMPETITOR 2: Justin MacLean. I'm 15.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: How long have you guys been cubing?

COMPETITOR 1: So I've been cubing for about a year and a half now. And Justin, how long have you been cubing?

COMPETITOR 2: I've been cubing for about three years now.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: What do you like about it so much?

COMPETITOR 1: I just kind of like—I went to his house before I got into this and I always saw that he had these and I just kind of liked the idea of learning how to solve something. And then near the end of last year, I learned how to solve a two by two and there it just progressed and progressed. And now I'm onto solving like lots of puzzles.

COMPETITOR 2: It's like—I just kind of enjoy to do it. It’s like kind of fun to see it like just form stuff. Even though I've been doing this for so long and I know how to do it, it's just fun to see it come together and see if you can get faster and faster.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: Hey, what's your best time?

COMPETITOR 1: Mine is 13.1. And I got like a complete last layer skip and I was pretty happy when it happened and I was just surprised, so.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: How about you?

COMPETITOR 2: My best time for three by three is 7.5 seconds and I had probably two F2L pairs and a PLL skip.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: Can you give me a quick demonstration now?

COMPETITOR 1: Yep.

COMPETITOR 2: Yep.

COMPETITOR 1: And I’ll scramble it here. Okay.

[Sound: Rubik’s Cube clicking]

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: Wow. [chuckles]

DAVE CAMPBELL: I was a kid in the eighties and it was one of those things that's impossible because there was no way to learn how to do it. You pretty much had to figure it out. But today, with the advent of YouTube and just the Internet, people being able to talk together, it enables people to learn to solve it so much faster to the point that I would say almost anybody can learn to solve the cube.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: So do you think I could learn to do it?

DAVE CAMPBELL: I totally think you could learn to do it and I think you should learn to do it.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: And what about Anna Maria Tremonti? Think she could do it?

DAVE CAMPBELL. I think so. Absolutely. She is super smart, right? So she probably could've done it without the Internet. But now that the Internet is here, she could totally do it. She should too as well.

[Sound: Rubik’s Cube clicking]

LL: I’m glad they’re not asking whether I can do it. [chuckles] Anna Maria gamely took up the challenge to see if she could master the puzzle, armed with a Rubik’s Cube. She got tips and insights on the solutions from Ian Scheffler. He knows a lot about the twisting story of the Rubik's Cube and the modern cube speed competition. He is a competitor and a journalist and he's written a new book titled Cracking the Cube: Going Slow to Go Fast and Other Unexpected Turns in the World of Competitive Rubik's Cube Solving. Ian Scheffler spoke to Anna Maria Tremonti last December from New York.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Hi there.

AMT: Well, how many of these cubing competitions have you been to?

IAN SCHEFFLER: As a competitor myself, roughly a dozen and I've attended several more than that as a spectator.

AMT: And what's your personal record time?

IAN SCHEFFLER: So there's actually a number of records. There's the single solve and then there's the average solve. My best average is 18 and a half and my best single is 16. That's in competition. At home I'm faster because everyone gets nervous on stage.

AMT: Hmm. Okay. Well, you're not going to teach me to do it in 16 seconds, are you? [laughs]

IAN SCHEFFLER: I believe you could.

AMT: Okay. Well, I’ll work on that. We'll keep talking. Tell me about your first experience with a Rubik's Cube.

IAN SCHEFFLER: So like a lot of folks, I was actually born in the nineties. I didn't grow up with this in the eighties. I saw it at a museum gift shop and didn't know that it was a puzzle in fact, which is very much like the inventor’s first experience. It was totally accidental. But my real love affair with the cube, I guess you could say, began at summer camp 11 years ago, when I happened to sit next to the greatest Rubik's Cube solver on the planet. And I didn't know that's what he was. I just knew he could do it under the table without looking at it. And it turns out he later was hired to teach Will Smith for The Pursuit of Happyness. He set the world record and years later, we reconnected and I started falling down the rabbit hole of competing.

AMT: And who is that, by the way?

IAN SCHEFFLER: So that's a young man named Toby Mao. And he's such a competitive guy—and you can look this up on YouTube—that when he got married, he and his wife eschewed the first dance and they'd met at a Rubik's Cube competition and like solving Rubik's Cube in jujitsu. So they decided to combine these two things by doing a jujitsu match in front of the wedding party with the caveat that if you can solve the Rubik's Cube first, you win. So with his now-wife choking him out, he managed to do it one handed.

AMT: [laughs] Well, okay. There's an interesting relationship. Let's go back. Rubik's Cubes were big sellers and then they seemed to disappear. What happened?

IAN SCHEFFLER: So you're exactly right. They basically dropped off the face of the earth. Part of it has to do with the nature of fads, right? I mean every fad has this life cycle where it blows up and then it dies. And with Rubik's Cube, because the amplitude of the fad was so big, I think the drop was commensurate with that. But part of it was that it had to do with the sort of specific history of the cube. It came out of Eastern Europe so there was a big commercial lag. In terms of meeting demand, it was hard to scale up at first. And there were a lot of pirated cubes that didn't work as well. But I think also just the absence of an easy way to learn how to do it meant that so many people got frustrated that they just gave up on mass. There was actually a patent issued in the US for basically a hammer called the Cube Smasher and it came with an instruction manual about all the different ways you could destroy a Rubik's Cube.

AMT: It's harder to destroy them today, isn't it?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yeah. Well, it's also less necessary since you know you can certainly go online and there’s YouTube tutorials that have been watched millions of times, although obviously to solve it fast is very different from just learning to solve it.

AMT: Well, the way they're made is a little different too, is it not?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yes, that's correct. So there are traditional Rubik's Cubes which you can buy at any big box store for your niece or nephew. And what we solve in the cubing community are called speed cubes and these are puzzles that are designed with speed in mind. The world record recently fell to just 4.73 seconds for a single solve. And the statistics on that, I think, were average of about 10 moves a second, you know, which is close to the speed of slow hummingbirds. So you need a specialty puzzle to actually turn it that fast.

AMT: What's in there?

IAN SCHEFFLER: So it looks exactly the same as a normal Rubik's Cube on the outside but it's much more curvilinear. So in the same way that you know if you put the engine of a Ferrari in a model T, it would look like a model T but the inside’s very different. There is also a lubricant. I had the very strange experience of being in a casino in Las Vegas at my very first competition and a young man came up to me and offered to lube my cube and I wasn't sure what exactly he meant by that. But we all do that in fact. And the puzzle has a core in it that's similar to the normal Rubik's Cube but you can adjust it, you can tension it. It's not unlike a car engine really.

AMT: That's so interesting. And of course, I let you just go by with that 4.7 seconds line there. That's pretty fast.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yeah. And believe it or not, that record—so there's two speed Cubers who are kind of like the Ronaldo and Messi of this little world and they've been trading that record off for the better part of half a decade now. And they were literally sitting next to each other at a competition in Australia and then one of them broke the record that the other one had just set weeks earlier by one one-hundredth of a second.

AMT: So interesting. So tell me about the man who invented the cube: Ernő Rubik.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yes. So I like to think of Mr. Rubik as the Willy Wonka of Eastern Europe. He's very wealthy, very reclusive, very creative. It took me two years to get a one hour sit down interview with him which was easily one of the most surreal hours of my life. And it was surreal in some ways because I had the experience of learning that Mr. Rubik is like his own puzzle. If you ask 10 people who’ve met him the same question, they're liable to give you 10 different answers. Not all of which can possibly be true. So he's a bit hard to puzzle out but it was very interesting to get to meet him. It's sort of one of the major storylines of the book, was the quest to understand like where did this puzzle really come from?

AMT: And so where does he live?

IAN SCHEFFLER: So he is a native and still inhabitant of Budapest in Hungary.

AMT: And he's in his seventies now, right?

IAN SCHEFFLER: That's right. He's in his early seventies. He was only 29 when he invented the puzzle.

AMT: And he's an architect.

IAN SCHEFFLER: That's correct. He's many things. He is a licenced practicing architect with an architecture firm based in Budapest. He's done work on the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, DC, among other projects. He also taught design for many years at a university in Hungary and he has been trained in sculpture and many other arts. His father was an engineer and his mother was a poet. So he's kind of literally the union of art and science.

AMT: And you say he doesn't have a dining room table.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yes. So back in the eighties, the most significant profile of him I found was written by an American journalist in the 1980s and he visited Mr. Rubik at home. As far as I know, he's the only person ever to have done that who was a reporter. And he asked where the dining room table was because Mr. Rubik had just built a new house. And Mr. Rubik said we'll just eat over there and he pointed to a corner of the kitchen which didn't look all that accommodating and the reporter asked well, do you plan to have many people over for dinner? And Mr. Rubik took a puff on his cigarette and said I hope not. That kind of sums up the difficulty of getting to know him.

AMT: Well, I guess he was just thinking too much about that cube. So how did he come up with the construction of this cube?

IAN SCHEFFLER: So that's the question that you get a lot of different answers to. I mean he himself has confirmed and denied some of the stories, like the idea that he invented it as a teaching tool for geometry or he was inspired by the shape of the stones of the Danube for the interior mechanism. But what seems to be generally true is that he is someone who loves playing with shapes and he wanted to create an impossible object because after all, the cube will remain a cube no matter how many times you manipulate it, which is a fairly unusual property. And he only put stickers on it, as I understand it, to understand where the pieces were travelling as he played with it. He didn't realize it was a puzzle. So he compared the experience in an unpublished manuscript to going for a walk somewhere you haven't been before and it was entertaining to see all the pretty patterns that arose. And at a certain point, as you often do when you go explore somewhere, he wanted to go home and that's the moment he realized he had no idea how and simultaneously the moment he realized he'd invented a puzzle.

AMT: And so how did he go from that, in communist Hungary, to selling this thing worldwide?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Well, that's a very convoluted story which took a while for me to puzzle out. And in fact, it involves a number of other players. One of the major ones is actually still alive as well. His name is Tom Kremer and he's a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who married into the British aristocracy and sort of found the cube when it was really not enjoying any commercial success at a toy fair in Germany. And he spent two years travelling the world in the late seventies just desperately trying to convince any toy distribution company and they wound up working with the Ideal company because the Ideal company was going bankrupt and figured that trying the cube out wouldn't hurt. It wound up saving the company.

AMT: Well, why was it such a hard sell?

IAN SCHEFFLER: So everything about the Rubik's Cube that makes it so successful, I think, is what makes it a bad pitch. It doesn't have anything electronic. It's extremely hard to solve on your own. There's no pre-existing intellectual property it ties to. The thing Tom heard over and over was how many Harvard professors are there? That's a very small market. And yet ironically, all of the things that were held up as deficits are the things that make it so distinctive and successful.

AMT: So the Ideal toy company of the United States buys it and what happens?

IAN SCHEFFLER: It just blows up. I mean Tom Kremer describes it almost as if it were like you know something out of a Roald Dahl story like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They just kept trying to ramp up production and ramp up production and they could never meet demand. It was really wild. Mr. Rubik for a while, when it was being distributed at first, was the only person on Earth to be able to solve it. And so he would show toy distributors that it could be solved and he would just go around toy fairs almost like an organ grinder's monkey. But as anyone who lived through that period knows, there was really no bigger fad on Earth at the time.

AMT: And so he becomes a millionaire in communist Hungary.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yes.

AMT: And Ronald Reagan actually thinks that this is an example of American entrepreneurship.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yeah. That was one of my sort of favorite stories that I found in this, is this was just such a successful product from a commercial standpoint that Reagan just naturally assumed it must have been made by an American. And he made this remark at the White House and it was written about by the New Yorker magazine as an example of why Reagan's aides wanted him to give fewer off the cuff speeches because of course, someone had to sort of stand up and be like well, actually it's from communist Hungary.

AMT: [chuckles] And this was a time, of course, when there was a very big wall between everybody.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yes.

AMT: So how is Ernő Rubik viewed today by Cubers?

IAN SCHEFFLER: I think in the same way that Methuselah might be, if sort of, he wandered into a church. You know I mean there's an exhibition called Beyond Rubik’s Cube that's travelling the world. And it's in Shanghai and Mr. Rubik travelled there for the opening and I've seen photos of lines out the door for hours of young Chinese Cubers and just Rubik's Cube enthusiasts waiting to meet him and have him sign their puzzles.

AMT: Wow. Really crazy, huh? When did competitive speed cubing really start then?

IAN SCHEFFLER: So there was a sort of first burst of it in the eighties. There was actually a very successful Canadian puzzle solver named Duc Trinh, who I believe was a Vietnamese refugee, and he made it to the world championships and did quite well. But it died out along with the cube and then it was revitalized in the early 2000s. The first modern world championship was in Toronto in 2003. And it's happened every other year since and it's grown to the point where there are now over 60,000 members of the World Cube Association. I neglected to mention earlier—that young man who sat next to me at summer camp, he and his brother helped create the World Cube Association, which made reconnecting with him even more surreal to find out he and his brother basically created the FIFA of Rubik's Cubes. Obviously they're less corrupt because they have less money.

AMT: Well, for you the holy grail of speed cubing is 20 seconds. How important did it become for you to crack that?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Fairly all consuming. Folks who've been listening this whole time will remember in that ad earlier, it mentioned a medical condition called Rubik’s thumb. So I myself acquired that, not intentionally of course. It was a repetitive stress injury that I got from solving not quite in the most ergonomic way. I visited my parents once and they got woken up because I was solving the puzzle and it makes this little clicking noise. I've got one here I can demonstrate. And they came over and said what are you doing? I said I’m just practicing. They said just go to bed. You know like it's very addictive.

AMT: You see mine doesn't make as fast a clicking noise as yours. [laughs] I’ve got mine too.

IAN SCHEFFLER: I’ve had a fair amount of practice. Yeah.

AMT: So you write about a multi blind competition. What is that?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Right. So if you go to a big Rubik's Cube competition, it's actually a lot like the Olympics. There's 17 different events. And my favorite to watch is the multiple blindfold. I think it's just really mind blowing. What that involves is not just solving one Rubik's Cube blindfolded, but solving as many Rubik's Cubes as you can blindfolded in a row without ever taking the blindfold off. The basic idea is you're given an hour and you can attempt as many cubes as you want, but you have to just put the blindfold on once you start solving and not take it off. What would you guess the world record is for that?

AMT: I have no idea.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Believe it or not, it's 41 cubes, I believe.

AMT: In an hour, blindfolded.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yes. By a young man in Poland. There's a great YouTube video of him doing this sped up, of course, and it's set to the “Flight of the Bumblebee.” And he’s just sort of going over and over solving these 41 cubes.

AMT: So how is it possible for someone to figure it out if they can't see it?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Well, you get to look at it first. And the way you remember it is actually using techniques that date back to ancient Greece. And you may have heard of the term the “memory palace.” You know Cubers will assign information to the parts of the puzzle that's easier to remember than trying to picture you know 41 Rubik's cubes in your head so you might—you know each piece might have a letter assigned to each sticker, like ABC or something and maybe letter A is where V is supposed to be. So you try to translocate those letters in your head or you assign images to the different stickers and you sort of you know maybe—I talk to Cubers in the book who do this—and one of them recounted that part of the narrative in his head that he had to follow in order to solve the cube involved “Donkey Kong punching a wall of owls out in space.” And I said well, if you can picture that, you know good for you because I certainly can't.

AMT: So interesting. Now what about people who are truly blind? They also go into competition, do they not?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Well, there are—I mean there's a number of colour blind Cubers. I myself have yet to witness a truly sight-challenged person solving the cube. There are sight-challenged people who’ve solved the cube but a blind person, I haven’t seen them in competition, although there are Braille cubes— cubes that are sort of tactile highly designed so that you can feel your way or you know sort of feel this is this side, this is this side, this is this side.

AMT: Has anyone ever been caught cheating at a cubic speed competition?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yes, actually. There was a large scandal in the late 2000s involving the greatest Cuber in the world at that time—a Hungarian prodigy named Mátyás Kuti—who really, sadly, really had no need to cheat. But it turned out he was peeking under the blindfold in the blindfold events and it was a big falling out and he was banned from the organization and kept the prize money that he'd won. It led to a rule change where now, even if you take your blindfold off, you still can't see because they put a giant sheet of opaque cardstock or paper in front of your face.

AMT: Hmm. And so why has this become so popular, even though it makes people you know quite obsessive?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Right. So I think that's the sort of core question.

[Crosstalk]

AMT: Maybe that’s the answer. [chuckles]

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yeah, but that's the core question I wanted to try to figure out. What about this diminutive piece of plastic has had such enduring appeal? Because after all, you can see it everywhere you look whether it's the movies, television, the news, the life of Edward Snowden or you know. And I think the answer is that there isn't one single answer. You know the Rubik's Cube company has tried to digitize the cube and never quite succeeded. It's got this tactile element that is very appealing. You know the young men who were interviewed earlier by your producer, they're the youngest, most digital folks in the world and yet here they are doing this analog activity. So it really, I think, touches on something very fundamental to the human, which is the desire to make order out of chaos.

AMT: In your book, you talk about going slow to go fast and other unexpected turns in the world of competitive Rubik's Cube solving. Going slow to go fast—what are you saying?

IAN SCHEFFLER: So that's kind of the kernel of solving fast, which I think actually can be applied to a number of other things in life. I don't know if you've heard the psychological term “flow”, which was actually first described by a Hungarian incidentally. But it's the idea that your optimal performance comes at moments when you're so keyed into what you're doing that time itself kind of dilates or changes character. And this could be happening whether you're working on a factory line or you're a ballerina on stage or you're solving a Rubik's Cube. I heard from lots of the fastest Cubers that their fastest solves felt the slowest, which didn't make any sense to me because I thought if you're going 100 miles an hour or 100 kilometres an hour, you're going to feel faster than if it's 60 kilometres an hour. And I didn't really believe it until I experienced it for the first time and I got a huge personal best. I got like a 33 seconds solve at a competition when I thought it would take a minute because I was just so focused on every passing moment. I mean it really is a very Zen activity. Solving Rubik's Cubes are like passing rosary beads, which I think is one reason we are so addicted to it. It's very meditative in a very calming kind of way because in order to go fast, you have to go slow. You have to enter this very meditative cast of mind.

AMT: And that is maybe the key then, huh?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Indeed.

AMT: The total concentration. So that nothing else around you is even—you’re not picking it up. You're just concentrating on that one thing.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yes. Yes.

AMT: So without getting too technical, how is it that some people can solve it under 20 seconds and some people can never figure it out?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Oh. Well, I think certainly part of it has to do with like the difference between trying on your own and being taught at least part of how to get there because I've interviewed hundreds of people and met only—you know I could count on two hands the number who figured it out on their own with no assistance. But it has to do with a combination of efficiency and speed. You know the reason Usain Bolt is so fast is not only that he can move his legs very quickly but he covers more stride with each step. So the most basic methods of solving the cube are very rote. You'll sort of repeat the same thing over and over until it works. But the more advanced you get, the more improvisatory and artistic it becomes, almost like playing a musical instrument. The fastest solves are almost like jazz solos, where in the same sense that a jazz musician has you know scales and chords that he or she knows that will you know create the bounds in which improvisation happens. If I'm solving a cube, I have a framework I follow. I divide it into layers, almost like a layer cake and I solve it from the bottom to the top and I sort of know generally what I'm going to do. But the precise things I do change from solve to solve. The cube is so complex—it’s got 43 quintillion permutations—that you actually never do the same solve twice ever, just by definition. So you're always thinking on your feet.

AMT: And quintillion is a billion billions?

IAN SCHEFFLER: Yes, that's correct. It's a billion billion. I did the math and found that if you wanted to gather enough human beings to represent by the number of their collective cells, the number of possibilities in just one Rubik's Cube, you wouldn't need a church full of people or even a soccer stadium. You'd need the entire city of San Francisco plus about a quarter of a million tourists.

AMT: Well, okay. So I’ve got my cube in front of me and I will—we've actually got something on our website that will help people out as well. But thank you. We have to let you go. And mine isn't solved but I'll work on that. I’ll report back.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Okay. Sounds good.

AMT: Ian, thank you.

IAN SCHEFFLER: Thank you for having me.

LL: I’m not sure whether we actually ever did hear whether Anna Maria solved the cube. [laughs] Ian Scheffler is the author of Cracking the Cube: Going Slow to Go Fast and Other Unexpected Turns in the World of Competitive Rubik's Cube Solving. He was in our New York studio. Now your challenge. Let us know about your Rubik’s Cube stories—whether it takes seconds, days. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or me @LauraLynchCBC or send us an email tip from our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for a new episode of The Current’s summer series, The Disruptors. This week Anna Maria explores the disruptive force of our addiction to technology. I’m Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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