Hey, guys, it's Mike Rowe. This is the way I heard it, the only podcast for The Curious Mind with a short attention span. This is episode number one, 60. It's called a groundbreaking structure of staggering possibility. It's a fun story. I hope you like it. I wrote it last week in an RV, partly in an RV and partly in an Airbnb. I spent five nights in an Airbnb and six days cruising around California with four old friends inside of a giant recreational vehicle.

Why? Because the time had come for a dirty jobs reunion and a road trip. Yeah, the rumors are true. We weren't out shooting new episodes of dirty jobs that may or may not happen. We'll see what kind of cards the universe deals us in the next few months. But for now, we thought it might be fun to look back at some of our favorite dirty jobs, adventures and misadventures and reconnect with some of our favorite essential workers, see what they're up to nowadays.

So I called the network. They were game. I called Barsky, he was game. And so Dave Barsky, Chris Jones, Doug Glover and Troy PAF, the guys who were really at the heart of dirty jobs in its heyday. We all got together. We all got tested for covid. We all passed the test, and then we all got into this RV and we spent the last five or six days together and it was great. I checked in with a lot of old friends from the show.

We're putting together the episodes right now. I'll let you know when you can see them. It'll happen pretty quick, I think. But this last week was really just terrific. It's why I've been so scarce on Facebook and I'm glad I was able to get this story done because it was inspired in part by something I saw on this trip, a structure that I had seen before in my travels, but not one that I had really taken the time to examine and explore.

And after doing a fair amount of examination and exploration regarding this structure, I came to the inescapable conclusion that it was in every way a groundbreaking structure of staggering possibility brought to you by a groundbreaking company called Zipp Recruiter. Yes, I know you've heard me talk about Zipp recruiter before. Please indulge me and give me 60 seconds to sing their praises again. I've used them to fill a number of positions in my modest organization. And if you're struggling to find the right person for the right job, honest to goodness, you should try them.

Won't cost you anything. Mattsson Resources try them. They were trying to hire a seasoned senior Citrix administrator to provide I.T. support. Now, look, I don't even know what that means. I just know it was a difficult position for them to fill.

And according to matching resources, they had heard, they had heard that four out of five employers who post on ZIP recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. So they posted this senior Citrix administrator position and boom, just like that, they found Peter out.

Cantor Jr.. Now, Peter was laid off during covid-19. He was anxious to find another IT job quickly. He's got a mortgage. He's got bills like most people. So he posted his resume on zip recruiter. Zip recruiter identified him as a great match for the Rolet matching resources.

They interviewed and hired Peter in less than three weeks.

That's how fast it happens even now when the world is upside down. Zip recruiter helped Peter find the right job and they help Madsen find the right person for a hard to fill role.

There it is. That's the moral of the story. See how they can do the same for you. Try them for free at zip recruiter Dotcom cigarroa. That's zip recruiter Dotcom cigarroa WTG honest. They work. I've used him, I know it. But that's not the way I heard it. That's the fact, Jack.

And this is a groundbreaking structure of staggering possibility. Back in 1974, long before he became a household name, the legendary architect was struggling to make ends meet. He was a professor in those days, teaching architectural design at the College of Applied Arts in Budapest and wondering what it might be like to be rich. Well, he was about to find out, thanks to a groundbreaking structure, that he was about to design, a structure that would transform an industry and make him the wealthiest architect who ever lived.

Long after his revolutionary designs began to appear in every major city, this wealthiest of architects sat down with CNN and revealed the secret of his enormous success. Space, he said, has always intrigued me, specifically the alteration of space by architectural objects and the repercussions of that alteration on man space time and the object itself.

Of course, CNN didn't exist back in 1974 and the press wasn't terribly interested with the teaching methods of a nontraditional architect who like to experiment in his classroom.

Thus, no one reported on the strange evolution of his initial prototype, a meticulously fabricated model consisting of 26 individual units, each perfectly symmetrical with the other, each capable of moving within the structure itself. At a glance, the blueprints proposed a design that appeared to be both uninhabitable and beyond the limits of modern construction at base. It was a modular structure that offered endless possibilities, possibilities. The greatest minds in architecture had never even contemplated Frank Lloyd Wright, Impey, Frank Gehry, Buckminster Fuller, Zaha Hadid.

None of them could have undertaken a project of this magnitude. Even the geniuses who gave us the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids of Giza, they'd have all been bewildered by this groundbreaking structure that challenged man's relationship with space and time. The fabrication began modestly. The architect took his students to the wood shop, where he had them carve out the individual units he needed to construct the prototype. He used wood because it was simpler to work with than the material he proposed for the actual construction.

To save time, he didn't bother to hollow out the units. He simply instructed his students to carve out 26 identical blocks of wood, bore a hole through the center of each and carry them back to the classroom where the real work began. Prototypes and models are tricky things.

In this case, the architect relied upon paint tape, glue adhesive, elastic bands and all the accoutrements of a vacation Bible school project on steroids. He was, after all, constructing a model upon which the efficacy of his entire thesis would be judged. In other words, the prototype is crucial. If you want to see your structure built in the real world, working from the blueprint and keeping his students engaged in every phase, the architect connected the wooden blocks in a way that allowed them to move around after construction was complete.

This was the heart of his great architectural breakthrough. Imagine a structure with individual units of identical size that could be physically rearranged within the confines of the framework. It was simply unheard of, ingenious and very nearly impossible to replicate.

In fact, it took a month for the architect to unlock the secret of his own blueprint. But when he finally did, his students saw the many possibilities his design afforded. It was their enthusiasm that convinced him to mass produce his prototype.

And that is when this soft spoken professor who taught architectural design behind the Iron Curtain realized his true purpose, the purpose he described to CNN 40 years later as the alteration of space by architectural objects and the repercussions of that alteration on man space time and the object itself. In other words, the wealthiest architect in the world made.

His fortune, by building a structure that no one could live in, a diabolical contrivance that began as a teaching aid meticulously designed to illustrate the importance of three dimensional thinking and alternative possibilities, possibilities that no, no less than 43 quintillion, a staggering number of alternatives that turned his teaching aid into the best selling toy in the world, a toy that invites children of all ages to drive themselves insane by compulsively arranging and rearranging those 26 brightly colored, three dimensional squares in the futile hope of segregating all six colors, thereby solving a frustrating puzzle invented by an architect who needed a month to figure out the damn thing for himself.

An architect called Erno now remembered and blamed for the infernal squares that bear his name, the three dimensional squares of a groundbreaking structure of staggering possibility. The Rubik's Cube. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. So that I sound a little frustrated there at the end, if so, it's only because I was this is the way I talked about the way I heard it, the only spontaneous analysis of the only podcast for the curious mind with a short attention span wherein I attempt to explain the circumstances that compelled me to write the story you just heard.

In this case, those circumstances are fairly straightforward. That's not always the case sometimes with this little bit of real estate. After the story, I take the opportunity to dive deeper into the larger themes that might resonate from the piece, maybe a splash about a bit in the sociological implications or the headlines currently defining our country. But here, no, it's really simple. I was lying in bed last Monday about 11 o'clock, and I was about to nod off and for some reason I opened up the drawer, the bedside table at the Airbnb where I was staying.

And in that drawer were several odds and ends a few books, some lotion of some kind and a Rubik's Cube.

So I removed the Rubik's Cube and began twisting and turning it, thinking perhaps that the twisting and turning would lull me into a slumber. Well, it didn't. The twisting and turning compelled me to do more twisting and turning and more fiddling. And next thing I knew, it was three o'clock in the morning and I had thrown the Rubik's Cube across the room only to see it bounce off of the wall and not shatter into many little plastic shards as I wished, but skidded back across the floor and landed right there next to me.

And so I took it with me the next morning in the RV and twisted and fiddled some more, and that evening back in bed, more twisting, more fiddling next day in the RV. I kept it with me by Friday. It became obvious I was not going to figure out the Rubik's Cube, which was frustrating, but on the positive side, I Googled Erno Rubik to see if perhaps there was something about this devil.

I could learn this man who had tortured me with his device for the last few days.

That's where I learned he'd been an architect. And that's when it occurred to me that this might be a fun story, a fun little misdirect. That's also where I learned that there were several quintillion solutions to the Rubik's Cube, making me feel all the more foolish for not being able to find even one of them anyway. That's how the story came out. I wrote it on the ride back home a couple of days ago and shared it with you just now.

I suppose if I wanted to ruminate, search for some larger theme, I might I might juxtapose the fact that the Rubik's Cube provides us with trillions of possible solutions, whereas the greatest matters of. The day seemed to limit us to just to this or that, pro or con, black or white, we're living in this time of incredible cookie cutter advice where everyone is being told essentially to do the same thing and think the same way and behave the same way.

We're all being weighed and measured, it feels like by a by a lot of people who are demanding answers. Maybe I'm just imagining it. But on social media, anyway, when you have five or six million people on a Facebook page, as I am fortunate to have in times like this, people.

People want to know where you stand and it's not unreasonable, I suppose, my my personal feelings around the issues of the day, the pandemic, the racial issues, all of that.

You know, of course, I have opinions, but I, I typically don't share them readily because I like to stay in my lane. Now, I have opinions about workforce and education.

I opened my big mouth on that all the time. But on these other issues, I'm typically a bit more circumspect. I like to I like to wait for a bit. I like to form an opinion that I can at least defend before I share it. But we seem to have lost our patience with silence.

Silence, I'm told now is violence. I know that because the meme says so. So it must be true. Right. So maybe when I opened up the drawer of the bedside table and saw the Rubik's Cube, maybe on some subconscious level, it reminded me of the box we've put ourselves into this binary box, this prison of of two ideas where you must either be for or against the thing and maybe on some subliminal level. I was attracted to the myriad of possibilities, the plethora of solutions afforded to us by the Rubik's Cube.

On the other hand, maybe I was just trying to do something to help me sleep, which ultimately made me frustrated and led me to throw the cube across the room pointlessly. Who knows?

Sometimes a cube is just a cube, I reckon back next week with another story and some more free association. Until then, stay safe. Be well. Adeus.