No One Wins Alone: Lessons in Partnership from Escape Room Experts David and Lisa Spira

Hi. How are you doing?

Good, thanks. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. And I. Like I said, I'm thrilled to be able to talk to you. I have this little, fantasy about things. They teach us things. Things teach us things. Not really a fantasy, but, like, I think if you're a musician, music has something to say about relationships. Or if you're an athlete that athletics has something to say about relationships. And I've had this, like suspicion that I think escape rooms have something to say about relationships. So I actually have clients, who? That's their thing. They like, they go around and they do these rooms. And so I asked him one day ago, is there like a couple that is kind of like the escape room couple, like, did they.

And they were like, yeah, there is. And so sure enough they pointed me towards your your blog and your website and and the sorry, I met the I was looking for the word podcast, which I listened to a couple of them and I'm obsessed. Now I just want I have all these like, questions and, just ideas that may have nothing to do with relationships, but I'm totally into it. I'm looking forward to just kind of kicking the can around.

Thank you. I since since I got your email, I have listened to, quite, quite a few episodes of your show. Right. And, I have, I have been truly enjoying it. Right.

Cool.

It's it's a wild experience listening to all of these different ways that people live and exist and thrive and suffer. And to be honest, half the time it's it's like, oh, wow, I, I could not imagine your life. And I'm getting the opportunity to do that for a few minutes. And that's that's really cool.

Yeah. I'm glad that you're having that experience. It's the experience I want. I, I say it often, but does it, does it bears repeating that I have this really enormous privilege of being with people. I sit with people all the time. I have heard thousands of stories about couples make their relationship work, and most people don't get to do that. Most people have about four stories. They've got their parents. They've got maybe their neighbor, their own experience, maybe their first marriage or something. But their in-sample is like four and mine's like 4000. So I wanted to make sure other people could do that, if only to break them out of kind of ruts that they're finding themselves in from time to time. So that you have had that experience is exactly the one that I want to share with Marriage Therapy Radio. So I'm glad that that happened.

Really been enjoying it. And and as you talk about the privilege, I also feel that way as I interview people who make all sorts of incredible things. And I'm like, I, I'm getting to have really in-depth conversation, record. Lask where I can ask literally anything I want of somebody who's incredibly knowledgeable and skilled and yeah, giving. And I just, I love doing that.

We had, AJ Jacobs on a couple of years ago, and I don't know if you saw that one or not, but.

I did not see that one. Yeah. But, AJ, it's an old friend.

Yeah. I love he is I mean, easily the nicest guy I've ever spoken with just because he's like, Scott. So much humility and just natural curiosity and wisdom. And right on the heels of writing his puzzles book, I was kind of had the same inquiry. I was like, what is what does this have to teach us about how to do relationships? And he had, of course, he had a lot of really thoughtful insights, but, that's cool.

Yeah, we we certainly have some opinions on escape rooms and relationships and, Yeah. Happy to dive in.

Yes. I'm going to give you my favorite piece of Lisa trivia, which is, I have to say your name. Lisa, I've got to say it a few times because I have this unique form of dyslexia. I don't know if that's what it's actually called, but I often call Lisa Kim and Kim Lisa. It is a thing that I do. So in my practice, when I have a Kim or Lisa come in, I have to say I am probably going to get your name wrong.

Just those two.

Names, just those two names. And in that way, and I do it with April and August, but that doesn't it does sound just as like weird, but, yeah, this little, like, short circuit in my brain.

That that's so unusual. And I've never heard of that. And my professional expertise is an autonomous station, which is an expert in names.

Okay.

So but I've never heard of anything like that. So now I'm super curious.

Now you have a new dissertation to write.

Just names. This only happens with these two names. Or is it likely those two thing also?

Now I do have a, there is a story. There's a little bit of a back story, which is my last, girlfriend in high school was Kim, and my first real love in college was Lisa and I. So I made this. Like, I think I have this cognitive leap that I connected, and I used to call that Lisa Kim. And then I'd course correct. I'd be like, I mean, I mean, that's not. And, you know, she kind of laughed a little until she didn't like it very much. And then, but then ever since then, I've just it's been like this thing that is just like in my just happens in my brain.

That's so funny.

That is funny. I when when Lisa and I had started dating, my previous like, committed relationship was with someone named Lindsay, okay? And I was very paranoid about mixing up the two like, nicknames. And so I came up with a variety of different words. I would say before her name, just to make sure I had enough time to make sure I was reaching for the right name.

I love it, I love it. Yeah. Okay then tell me about tell me about your relationship. Tell me about your. When we just started dating, how did you come together? How did you find one another?

So all of this ties to escape rooms.

Okay. From the beginning, it's like the. It's in the origin.

Yeah. It is. I started with a snowstorm, actually. Okay. So there was a snowstorm, and so I had worked from home, and I didn't usually work from home. And I had a terrible roommate at the time, so I'd been working from home all day with this woman, and I was like, I'm leaving. She was also working from home that day. I was like, I know, I knew there was a bar in town on the other side of town that did craft beer tastings. On Wednesday nights, and I'm not even a huge beer fan. I just was like, this is a thing I can go to. I had a friend who lived only like two doors down from this bar. I was like, she'll go, even though it's a snowstorm. So she said, sure. So I met her at the bar and she invited someone who invited David, which is how we ended up standing in the same corner of this bar on a very snowy night.

Okay, it was just finishing helping build a completely insane dating app. Okay. It didn't make it all right. It was a terrible idea. But,

That's what made it insane. Hold on. I want to know about the word insane.

It was.

Really bad idea.

It was a bad idea. It was.

Fired him.

But it was framed as a dating app. A reverse dating app where instead of being able to access the profiles, you would only be able to access a profile if someone in real life handed you a business card that had a terrible pickup line on it, and a QR code that would go directly to your profile. Okay. I don't remember what all of these cards were, but like the one that it really stuck in my head was, I bet I'm more fun than your date. And just thinking through the implications of, like, how and when you would be, like handing this to someone was just gross. But the woman who was who wanted this thing built, she hired a friend. A friend hired me, and I was out there doing experience design for it. And so I just finished doing this and I went to this bar. I'm also not really a beer drinker, but in Cabin Fever.

When is this?

This is, January of 2014. Yep.

Okay. Yeah.

And you had just played your first escape room.

Yeah.

So, David had played his first escape room like three days before this. It was like the weekend before. And so he was telling me about this concept where you were in this room with your friends, and you were solving all these puzzles, and I thought that sounded interesting. I asked questions.

And so I asked for her number, and,

And then he called and we lived ten blocks apart. We had been on the same dating apps at the time. It hadn't paired us up, and we met in real life in a bar, which is totally uncharacteristic for both of us.

That's amazing. I love that, and I have so many questions about the escape room thing. I'm gonna tell you how I play an escape room. This is how I do most puzzles, actually, I, I'm like, I can't wait to do this. This is going to be so fun. I'm so excited about this. I get like, you know, that you must know about that franchise of, tabletop games called exit. Oh, yeah. So there's a, advent calendar. So I got, like, we got, like an advent calendar doing it because. But I'm like, maybe 40s in. I'm like, hint please, I like it. I'm ready for my hint. Go ahead and hook me up with that. So, you know, I is there a name for it? Guys like me, what is that called? And then also, I suspect if I actually played and began to understand the patterns and the themes and the the consistencies, maybe I would not be that guy.

I call that being a little hint happy. Okay, and you're right, it puzzles are a language. Every single type of puzzle that you've ever seen is a language, and there are ways to learn how to get used to those languages and become conversant. And then, you know, on the more advanced side and the escape rooms are not advanced puzzling. There are things called puzzle hunts that are like, that's where the hard puzzles live. And this is on a level that is difficult to understand until one of them has, you know, kicked your butt. But escape rooms are all about communication and observation. They're not about smarts. I would rather play with somebody who couldn't finish high school, but communicates well and is kind than somebody who has, you know, three PhDs and is a jerk.

I love that, I love that so much. So, so how did you roll into that? Did you have a first? Like so, Lisa, you never almost did it right there. Almost got. You came as like. So, Lisa, you, you hadn't played before before you met David.

Interesting. Was that we we. David found escape rooms so early that he had played the escape room on the East Coast. Yeah. At that time, there were two companies on the West Coast and one company on the East Coast, and they had one game in New York. You have to think back to 2014. It's crazy to think that that's how it was. But like they weren't that thing yet. Yeah. So David was telling me about this and it sounded really cool. But he had played the escape room, so we had I didn't play one until that company in New York opened the second game, and that was my first escape room. And it's funny because I was on the subway going to the game. We were going to it separately. I was.

So stupid. This is this is one of the dumbest things that I did.

Yeah, it worked out fine. But, and for some reason we weren't going to the game together. I was meeting him there, everybody was meeting at the game, and so I was on the subway and I was like, I am going to play a game about like where I have to be smart and solve puzzles in a timed experience with my new boyfriend and all his friends who are so good at this because they've done it. One time.

Did.

One right. What? What? Like what am I an expert on?

Yeah. And this is where you were meeting them for the first.

Yes. I had never met any of them before. So I had maybe met one person, I think.

But the stupid thing was deciding to meet their like. Or you told me the stupid.

Stupid thing was that I was going to introduce my new girlfriend to literally all of my friends in this, like.

Like in a high stakes. It's not really. I felt like I had the highest stakes, like puzzle, pressure cooker. Yeah. Because there's also escape rooms back in 2014 were really hard. The games have evolved a lot over the past more than a decade. And at the time, they really were a battle against the game. A lot of times, there was a lot of bad puzzle design as people were figuring out how to do this. So you couldn't count on the game to necessarily always make sense. And so, no, we lost a lot of games back then. Everybody lost a lot of games back then. They were less there was less experienced design.

Yeah. We used to find games that had a 2 or 3% escape rate, and we called them inescapable rooms with a margin for error.

Yeah. So it seemed it was very it seemed like a very bad idea. But, you know, I was committed. And then I was very confused for most of the game, but then I solved the final puzzle. They brought everything together.

You got my my loudest, oldest friend to shut up.

Yeah.

And you solve the right puzzles. You solve the puzzle.

Yeah.

And we won.

It. That's all she wrote? Yes, we've been doing it ever so. Okay, so what have you learned? What you tell me about it? I listen to the whole, like, industry report. You're in industry report where you're talking about all the trends and the stuff and the growth and, but of course, that's more on the numbers side. What about on just the, like the experience kind of interactive side? What's what have you what what would you call takeaways from this, passion? I was about to say hobby, but it's hardly a hobby, right.

It's actually I mean, it's it's become a weird job.

Yeah. Everything.

Yeah, it's it's hobby. It's job. People ask like, oh, or, you know, you're traveling. Is it for work or for pleasure? And it's like, okay. Yeah. Both. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's it's just an incredible space where there are escape rooms are like any other media is, you know, there are good books and there are bad books, and there are good video games and they're bad video games and they're good movies and there are bad movies. And that is how escape games are. There are wonderful games that will blow your damn mind. You know, there's a you know, there's a they're games that have performers in them that are deeply emotional, that will make you cry. There are games that are they built like Disney level productions that will just leave you filled with wonder and awe and you know, people, you know, you haven't asked it, but I'll I'll answer.

You know, we've we've played about 1300 escape rooms. And the question that always follows is, are you sick of them? And the answer for us is just that. The highs are higher, the lows are lower. And we've just we've seen people do incredible things, and we keep seeing people do incredible things. And we will keep exploring this until they stop. And I see no sign of that slowing down.

And I'll add that it was different. Things drew us each in. But I'm the person I've always been, the person in my friend group who organizes people to do things, and what excited me about escape rooms because I was not a video game player. David played a lot of video games and kind of came into this from another angle, but I didn't. I mean, I liked puzzles of different kinds, but that's never really been my thing. But I, I was always looking for interesting things to do with people in person. My job has always been in front of a computer screen. So how can I do something with my friends? Like, I don't want to go to a movie and watch a screen again, and it's nice to go to dinner and talk about things, but it would be so nice to do something.

And what I loved immediately about Escape Rooms was a group of us were doing a thing together, and then afterwards we would go get a coffee or a beer or dinner or something and talk about who solved what and what moments happened and the things that I didn't see and the things that other people saw. And, I mean, we're both critics. That's how we started being escape room reviewers. So that came naturally to us, too. We like to critique the experiences that we do. But, I like the idea of doing things together with people, and I think that that's one of the things that has kept us in this for so long. It's not just the games as the way David explained them, which it certainly is that too, but it's all the people that we've met along the way.

I'll agree with that. And I'll add that for me, like I grew up playing video games, it was really central to my social life and my way of being, and I have barely played video games since 2012. Video games kind of died for me due to a combination of moving out of my home town, not being in college anymore, and local and co-op video gaming or competitive video gaming. Shifting to an online mode. For me it was always about playing with my friends, getting everybody together in the same room basement. Yeah, yeah, being, you know, the trash talk and the, you know, seeing people do cool stuff. And when it was just me alone in my room, even if I'm playing with other people, but they're not there, I it just lost its appeal and I escape rooms filled this void for me. That was like social play.

That's, cool. The reminds me, I wanted to tell you that, also. And, you know, I guess it was a playhouse, when you had a segment about or she had a segment about, gifts or recommendations that are not physical, like they're, you know, I wrote down everything. I was like, I got to figure out how to play that game and watch that YouTube channel and do this. But Rebecca, my wife and I, we found a game that we're playing now. We're not gamers. We never have been. We're just empty nesting and we're trying to figure out, like, what are we supposed to do now? And, maybe escape rooms end up on it. But we started with, a video game called It Takes Two. Yeah. You know, this game we're playing this now, so we just beat them later.

But it's it's it's very big in our community.

Yeah, yeah. I just we just beat the vacuum cleaner, which I guess is the first boss. Like, it's like we were like, oh, this was all fun and games when you're just wandering around trying to figure out how to shoot yourself over a lava bed or something, but then you had to actually fight somebody. And we were like, I don't like the fighting so much, but, anyway, so, we're done with video games. We're playing, games. Do you? I've played two of them. And in both cases, I was 100% in charge of who was in the room. So when was my birthday? And about it, my friends. And one was a gift certificate I had. And I brought in some friends. But do you show up at these things sometimes. And you're just playing with strangers, or do you have a how does that work.

In the olden days.

Of 2014? Yeah.

216 okay. Everything was public booking in the United States. Okay.

Only in the United States and China.

Yeah. China is a whole separate issue. There's some interesting stuff there if you want to talk about it. But I could I could set it aside.

Yeah.

A lot of our community was born out of the fact that you had to play with strangers. And we, broadly speaking, didn't want to. Sometimes we had great experiences with that, but a lot of times we had some real weird experiences. One of the earliest experiences least, I had gone down to D.C. she was speaking at a conference, and I had traveled with her, and I had decided while she was at this conference, I was going to just book randomly into a game where there were at least two tickets that had been purchased, and I ended up playing. I was the third wheel on the worst date that I have ever seen. This couple hated each other.

Oh man.

So much. They were so mean to each other and I didn't know what to do. I thought there was a chance that I was like on like punked or something like that. Like it was so it was so full of vitriol and venom that I, I thought it might be fake. So, like, that kind of thing did happen. Yeah.

We also met some really wonderful people early on because we randomly booked into the same game as they did. Yeah. And that was like, you know, created friendships that way. But very shortly after we started reviewing, we stopped playing public games because it was a huge risk to the review. And the companies wouldn't, you know, want us to take that risk playing with whoever also booked it? Yeah. So it's been a really long time. But since we played public games, but also everything started moving to private games because generally it's a better customer experience and only companies in big cities who were really going to sell 8 to 10 tickets to these games, like, did it even make sense.

In those public ticketing days? We made a lot of friends. Yeah. And we would all start to travel with one another. And there was this kind of nascent escape room community that was forming and we just would go places, you know, we would go to Toronto with this couple that we had met and played one game with, and so there ended up becoming this community. And, you know, they would come and stay at our place and they came to New York or New Jersey, and we would go and crash on their couch when we went wherever they lived. And so we ended up building up this, this, this community of people who liked to travel, to play these games. And that's sort of where a lot of like, you know, a lot of this spiraled out for us was we were we were meeting all of these really interesting people. We we made a lot of really cool, cool friends.

And then we started building escape room tours, in part to help other people have this experience, because we found that, we could connect with all these people because we had this website, people would write into us, people would read our stuff. We had a way to build this community, but most people don't have it, especially there are a lot of players who either that like maybe they and their partner or their best friend play together, but their friends don't want to do it. Or people who are single, or whose spouse or partner doesn't like the sort of thing they can't get a group together, or people who have a group of friends who will play, but their friends don't want to travel to another city to play. So there were people looking for this community, and by running escape room tours, we could help all these people find each other.

And that's one of our favorite things. When people come on our tours and they meet and then they book another trip together to somewhere else.

I love that. So all right, so what is it again? I sort of want to I want the secret. Like, what is it that makes the two of you and do you play? Do you ever play just two of you, like the two of us played this game or occasionally?

Is it more like we're on, like a vacation? That's not really for escape rooms. If we're traveling for escape rooms will travel with another couple. We're just taking a vacation, and maybe we'll slip a couple of games in. Then we tend to play on our own.

Yeah, yeah. If we end up somewhere, just the two of us then. And we want to add one. Yeah.

But you don't need ten people. You can do it with two. That's fine.

No, two, 4 or 5 is good number.

And then okay, so what are the two of you good at that makes you good at this.

Well, we're good at communicating. That makes us good at doing this together okay.

I mean, I am very observant and I'm good at dexterity tasks and.

I'm much better at words and logic. I'll do the math if one has to, but that's not really a thing anymore.

Oh yeah.

I would say that for the most part, both of us could do just about anything that would commonly come up in an escape room. Can I say, if there was one thing that like it that each of us really specializes in, if we have to read a lot, Lisa's doing it. And if we have to interact with an actor, which is rare and only really tends to show up in very high end escape rooms. I do a lot of the social engineering challenges that that the talky stuff.

Yeah. I don't I don't like to do that part as much.

Which is also why, like if you ask a question almost always, I am the one who is answering first. And it's just because Lisa likes to have a little bit more time to mull over the question.

And yes, I love it. It speaks first for us typically.

By design, like you're aware of, like, yeah, cool. What, what makes the two of you good at communication? So we're good at communication. How do you know what is what are the characteristics of your communication that matter to you?

We're both very thoughtful about it. I think we both put a lot of effort into how we communicate. I mean, we both studied language and communication. I mean, I studied linguistics, David studied communications. So we both thought about this a lot over the course of our lives. And I think that we both enjoy putting in the effort to communicate as clearly as possible. It's its own little puzzle. We both enjoy finding the right words for things, finding the straightest path to something, coming up with the interesting mechanic that we can use again, and again. So we're very good at, you know, if you're in an escape room and somebody is on this side of a wall and somebody on that side of a wall, and you have to, you know, explain things like how we would immediately draw a grid to communicate to each other. But then in our lives, we can use those same things to communicate.

Yeah. We also we never we never fight. We never bicker. We never yell at each other like we've been together 12 years, married ten, and there is not a single time we were just talking about this. There's not a single time where either of us have ever raised our voice to each other in anger. We have.

I well, I don't raise my voice at anyone.

Yeah, but. Okay. That's amazing. I have two thoughts about that that are just hit pocket like thoughts. Number one is I sometimes I'll say I never trust people who haven't argued like I never trust.

We'll argue, but we've never raised our voices in an okay argument, okay? And we never get into arguments when the pressure is on. Okay. If if we're going to have a disagreement, it'll be after everything is said and done. We always just sit down and talk about what was done. That was annoying. That was a problem that could have been better. And we we both always just kind of approach it as there's a decent chance that both of us contributed to that situation, and we're both going to work as quickly as we possibly can to figure out what adjustments we need to make in our ways of being. That will make sure that that doesn't happen again. And we try not to make the same mistakes twice.

I think we both always like we're both always trying to become better people. We've always said to each other, we're happy that we met when we met, and not earlier, because we were both on individual journeys to be better people and better partners.

If we had met a year earlier, it wouldn't have worked.

Tell me about that.

I wasn't I wasn't mature enough. I wasn't comfortable enough in my own skin. I was still trying to figure out how to set aside neuroses and kind of get out of my own way and be able to be a good partner.

Yeah, I think for me, a lot of the same things, although maybe a year would have been fine. But three years earlier I was really focused on, I don't know, other other things, and I wasn't being a great partner and I wasn't I wasn't thinking about that.

We both are, you know, at our core were critics. And part of that is being self-critical for us. Like we're very like we're very honest with ourselves. Like, it's very rare that one of us is pointing out something to the other that is like new information. Yeah. We're both like, oh, yeah, okay. You're. That's annoying. You okay? I can I can adjust me to. Yeah, yeah. Like, I, I.

The other thing I'll say is that we, we run a company together and so we're always we are the leadership of it. And we are cognizant to be on the same side as each other always. So if we do disagree with each other, we're very careful to take that back privately, to always support each other publicly and then figure it out later, which probably also helps emotions because we know that because it's later, we'll we talk about it. Yeah. Because we always know that we are doing this together.

Yeah. And like, you'll never catch me having a conversation with a friend about like, oh, Lisa, you know, like the fastest way to get me to never want to hang out with you is when is when I'm sitting, you know, hanging out with a group of guys and everything. Everybody is talking about their girlfriends or, you know, or their wives, like the, you know, the women. Am I right type? Yeah. Type five. I'm out. I've got no time for that, no patience for that. And I feel like if I aside from the fact that I don't, I don't subscribe to that worldview. I think letting that in is putting yourself on the path to self-destruction.

And we both know that we have very different skill sets too. We try to really divide what we do. I mean we, we divide what we do maybe way more than most. But it's actually very surprising that you email David because David doesn't do email, all the emails come to me and we try to direct all the emails to me because.

I didn't do it. I just gave it to my guy. I said to my buddy, my book, Sam. I was like, can you find these guys?

So it's just very funny that they found David, because that's not usually where things come into, because he's not the one who's going to reply to emails.

I'm terrible at it, you know?

I really love it. Like, you're you're like, if I were giving like, a, like a tutorial on, like, how to do a relationship or how to get it right. I would, I would be saying a lot of the things that you're saying, I would be saying in them in different ways, like, I have my, my codes or whatever. But not everybody knows how to do this. Why do you know how to do this? Why do you did you come up with some great parents? Did you learn the hard way? Did you just get lucky? Like, why is it that this is a skill set that you have?

It's. It's a little bit of all of it. I mean, we both definitely are children of fairly functional, you know. Yeah.

Marriages, both of our, each of our sets of parents are in long term healthy, committed marriages that they are still in today.

So yeah, we grew.

Up with good examples, both of us.

Yeah. I would say that for me, I went on a really rough journey. I was mature in some ways and very immature in other ways. And you know, I would say as a teen, as an in my 20s, recognized in myself that there was maturity, didn't realize that it wasn't categorical. And being in other relationships and seeing how things fell apart, I like I said, I'm very self-critical. And so like, you know, back in the day when we would lose an escape room, we would sit down and figure out exactly what mistakes we made, what could we have done to go and figure out, to make sure that we don't make those same mistakes happen again? And that was how I kind of approached literally every failed relationship, every bad date.

I would leave a bad date and be like, I did not like me on this. I'm definitely not like she's not going to want to go out with me. And I didn't like me. And so I would just figure out like, well, what is it that isn't working? And there were a lot of little things that I took away from relationship, past relationships, like, my, my description of it is like, I will never get into a fight over how someone loads the dishwasher like. And that's just like an analogy for anything. But like our rule with ourselves is like, if one of us has a strong opinion about how something is executed, that's the person who does it. Yeah. And if whoever has the stronger opinion about a thing, congratulations, that's your job. If neither of us have a strong opinion, then we share it. And if not, and if neither of us has a strong opinion, and one of us is like, way better at it than we do that too. But

We like to do things efficiently, so the person who is better at it also is a good person to do the task.

Or just the person who suffers the least like I like, I will clean the toilets because you don't like to clean the toilets and.

And I will always wash the dishes because you wash the dishes too slow and we can be doing better things with our time. So I'll do it.

Yeah, but like I would say that we've, I had gone through my own kind of journey of getting into needless fights and needing to be right. A lot. And the fact of the matter is, it doesn't matter who is right or wrong. In fact, like there is no there's no winning in a relationship unless it's a collaborative win. That's and that's kind of how escape rooms are. It's sort of like you, if you are going into an escape room with the mentality of, I am going to solve more puzzles, I am going to be smarter, I am going to be better than my teammates. You're just planning on going in and being a jerk. And that's it's I think it's the same with a relationship.

If you are trying to be the better partner, the more enlightened partner, the more effective partner, the better parent, the favorite. I don't care what it is if you are going in thinking about anything other than it's just you win and lose together, You are going to lose.

I also think that we have a lot of respect for each other, like part of falling in love with each other was thinking, here is an individual who I find so interesting and so fascinating and who I want to be with all the time. And I think we both felt that. And that's a mutual respect that also really helps us a lot.

Yeah, I love that. I feel like I had just like, I don't need to say anything. Just let you guys talk about how relationships work and when they're the, I am interested in this, though. I think when people relationally are having a hard time and there and there and there's something that's like lingering because they didn't have a good vacation or they didn't have a good argument, or they didn't have a good sexual experience or something. A lot of times what they'll do is they'll try and go back and and rehash it, and that rehashing looks a lot more like litigating than, say, problem solving. And so you come out of an escape room and I think people ought to do this more often is go, all right, where do we get wrong and where do we go?

Okay, so we're going to do this better next time, right? I always sort of say the only reason to rehash it and escape Room is to learn as much as possible about when we're wrong, and then set yourselves up for success the next time. So what have you learned about what goes wrong when you lose escape rooms?

I'll add the other reason to rehash an escape room is because people have moments of glory in them, and it is so fun to go back and make sure that that is recognized and get the little details that you missed because you were on the clock and you weren't going to ask. But, setting that aside,

But we don't need to set aside too fast because that is do you find that that that that is true even when the game be you?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you always had wins along the way. There's always the I solved this really cool puzzle in the corner that David didn't see because he was over there working on that other thing and like, tell me how you solved that. Like, what did it do? How did it work? That thing.

I mean, if you're think about it as any game, you know, baseball, soccer, football on the games that you lose, there are still great things that people did short on the of course.

Still a highlight reel.

Yeah. So it's it's like that. And I think that like the worst coaches are the ones who can't take a second and say, yep, we lost. But there were some good things that happened in that game.

You guys, I think this will actually I'm not kidding when I say I think this might actually transform the way I do some therapy, because I spend a lot of time helping people go back and repair. Let's see, sometimes they have different names. What's the name right now? Regrettable Incidents is one of the names like, And I don't think we spend any time going, okay, okay, cool. But what did you get? Right? Like, what little mini wins did you have? Like what what what evidence of growth was present in the even in this fight that that happens sometimes it's actually over a dishwasher literally like I've had. I can't tell you how many times I've had that conversation.

I've had that like that. That example didn't come out of nowhere. Like, I have had that fight multiple times with an ax. And looking back at the time of breakup, being like, I still care about this person, like. And it's to someone who I'm genuinely still one of my closest friends now. We just couldn't make it work as a relationship. The only exit I'm actually friends with.

She's great. Yeah, we're friends too now.

Yeah, okay. But, like, fantastic.

I don't doubt it.

I, I remember because we, we broke up on very good terms of like, both really caring about each other but also being like at this isn't going to work. And looking back at it, there was just like a lot of things that I was picking fights over or she was picking fights over that were just not not material to the relationship. They were fights for the sake of fights. And that was like I when I talk about like I needed, if I had met Lisa earlier, it was that was the thing. It was realizing that, like, I did not want to fight. I did not want to be right. And it didn't matter whether we could have squeezed another bowl into the dishwasher. Like that was a really wild way to self-sabotage.

That's intense. And for the record, there is no right way to load a dishwasher. That is, that is a conclusion I have come to as a professional relationship expert. It's for those of you out there who think there is, you are incorrect. Yeah.

I agree.

So he's asking you, this this got buried is when you've, when you've debriefed, particularly the games that have beaten you are there themes like do you know, do you know why? What do you learn. What have you learned about what what doesn't work these days?

It's it's pretty rare. We're we're very good at that. Of course. Of course. But in the early days, we would look and kind of ask ourselves like a what? What were the moments that made us lose time.

So one great example from the early days is not finding something because you weren't observant. So let's say that we unlock a cabinet that was locked before we started early on our team with the best practice of if you're the person who opens the cabinet, you reach in and take the cool thing and hand it to someone else so that the next person can participate in the next thing.

Okay?

And if you stand up and walk away, there might still be something in the cabinet that was behind the cool thing. And so now our team, let's say that was near the end of the game. Whatever. No one no one searches that cabinet again and we lose because we never found the thing that was behind the cool thing.

And turned out there were two things in the safe after you opened it and you found the one, you didn't notice, the other, you walked away.

So we adapted. We said, first of all, if you open something, search thoroughly. There might be something else there. Secondly, if someone else already searched the place, it is being a good teammate to open that safe again. And look, it is not a slight on the person who looked first. It's a good teammate to check that things have been found, and we've normalized that as that's how you're supposed to play.

And if you snap at somebody and say, I already searched that, you are wrong for snapping. Double checking is always good. If you think you have a solid solution to a puzzle and the code isn't working, then hand the lock to someone else. Let them try that same code. This is not a slight. You don't get angry. Double checking is good. It's good. Team play is good. It is a kindness. It is great that you remember to double check me.

And we've created a whole lot of these types of, I would say, rules like best practices for play. That makes the play more fun for everyone. We use them on our tours. We tell everybody these are the tour house rules. When you play with other people, you play whatever way you want. But when you come on our tours, these are the house rules and this is how we all play. Yeah. And we've, you know, put in and they all almost all of those came from mistakes that we made as players. And we were like, well let's lost the game.

Like, yeah, don't put anything in your pocket. Never, never use your pockets for the hour. You're in that game. Your pockets don't exist. Because the worst way to lose a game and I lost this way once is for someone to find something important, say, oh, this is important. I'll need it later. Putting it in their pocket and then forgetting they were very drunk. I was, traveling for work and with a client and a sales person. The sales person was hammered, and, yeah, just was hoarding things in his pockets, and we couldn't make any progress. The game bound up, and it was it was impossible. And it was because this guy kept putting things in his pockets and, like, forgetting they were there.

That's crazy.

It was miserable. And we were getting all these hints from the game master, who was also bewildered and hints were weren't making sense because we were finding the stuff. It's like that was that was a mess.

But now we tell people, you don't put anything in your pocket, ever. If you find something cool, you set it on the surface in the middle and you say, everybody, I put the cool item right here in case you're looking for something that has a trapezoid shaped base. It's here on this table.

Yeah. Call it. Call out your observations. Call out your solves. If you think you're about to trigger something cool, invite everybody over so they can partake in it so that nobody misses something.

And if it turns out you didn't trigger something cool, that's okay. We'll all go back to what we were doing.

Don't fall into that person. Yeah. You know, be thankful that they called you over. Yeah. And like other things like, If you are, if you're having a bad time, shut up about it. Just experience the room. Let other people have a good time. Talk about it later. You can let all of your anger about the game out after the fact, but the odds that the odds that everyone in the room is having a bad time are pretty low. It's sort of like watching a football game. It's like, you know, like I'm bored. Well that's fine. There's other people who are riveted in watching, like, let them enjoy it at the end. If you want to say, hey, this was not my idea of fun, I'd rather do something else with you later. Like, that's better than going in, disrupting the game and being like, well, I don't want to be doing this now, right?

I learned two things on your podcast. Well, one thing that blew my mind. Have you done these yet? There there are Airbnbs that are actually escape rooms. Like, do you go and you spend the night there? Yeah, yeah. Have you did you this. Yeah.

Yeah.

There's one called Wild Heart Ranch.

That's the one in California.

Tree. Yeah. It's amazing. We had a great time.

Yeah. It's an escape room. We can have sex in.

I want to I want to do that. I want to go, like, like, mess around. And just for the my, my, my wife has, it's not fault. It's not fake, but she has a, like, a claustrophobic aura, so she destroys things. I can't do escape rooms because I don't want to be locked in a room for an hour. And I go, well, first of all, you're never, like, actually laughing.

Fire code prevents that. Certainly in North America. Yeah. There are parts of Eastern Europe I would not recommend that you visit, but.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I learned you're the fire code guy, and, like, this is like you're.

Yeah, this is this is what my what? My life has become your parents.

Your current soapbox. Yeah. But anyway, I was telling her about the one I saw. The one that you described in California, and, I was like, you can leave any time you want. You can, like, go outside and go for a walk. You can come back in, you can have sex, you can eat your dinner. You can just kind of keep working it out.

So including going going outside is a part of that part of it. Yeah.

Spoiler alert.

It's incredibly obvious that there are interesting things happening outside of this place as soon as you arrive.

Yeah, yeah. Right on. Okay. Well, you got anything else? You any other pearls of wisdom or anything that we need to hit or that you were like, I gotta make sure we talked about this before. Before we get off, because.

Not all escape rooms are created equal.

Okay?

We got guides on room escape artist to help you find it. If you need something really specific, hit us up on our contact form. We will help you.

Get this to me because I answer the emails.

Yeah, Excel got tell me about a tour. What's to tour?

So we run escape room tours to some of the top destinations to go play escape rooms in the world. Our upcoming tour, our next one is in April and we're going to Orlando, okay. Also to Clearwater and Port Charlotte by bus so that we can play all the best escape rooms in the region.

Okay.

If you come on one of our tours, all you have to do is show up in the city. You fill out a form that tells us a bit about you as a player and what you've played in the region, and we make teams for you. You'll play with a bunch of different teams over the course of 3 or 4 days. You'll experience a bunch of different styles of games. You'll get some behind the scenes, you'll meet the creators. We'll give you a little bit of the history of escape rooms in that area, and you'll meet wonderful people. You can come by yourself, you can come with your partner or a friend. You can come with a small group of friends, and we will help you find other players and experience these games. And you won't have to do any of the annoying thing like book them.

We have an incredibly kind and caring community of people, really diverse, all sorts of different ways of living and being. And it's, it's just a it's a really good group of people, and people come from all ranges of experience. We have had people show up who have literally played zero escape rooms before showing up on the tour, and people who've played over a thousand.

Oh, man. So if I come though, do you put me in a hotel? Do you, like, give me dinner or do I just am I? I'm responsible to meet the ball, the bus at the right time, and.

We get a discount at a hotel that's in a convenient location. And, and so most of the group will stay in the same hotel, in the same location, and you will get your exact schedule of games. If the games are really far, we'll be running busses to them. If not.

Uber, Uber works.

Or if you rent a car if you can drive to that destination. And so yeah, we often we get we get restaurant recommendations from the escape room companies there. So they'll be like, these are my five favorite places near me. We put all of that in a document. And people usually, you know, go out to meals with their teams in between the games.

And when there's a real tight turnaround, we cater the food and make sure that everything can run smoothly. We run a real tight ship and, yeah, we just try to do our best to take care of people. We've got all of our first aid certifications and, and a lot of, wow, a lot of love and effort goes into this. We've been running these since 2017.

Right. What's after April? I can't come in April. But what would be next? Or do you know yet?

We have not announced where we're going this fall. It'll be in October or November, and we're working on that now. Yeah.

Very cool. I saw I heard the segment on your, on your thing about, whatever's going on in Japan, and I think you said something like this is closing soon, but in April, I'm actually going to Japan, with my wife to my younger daughter studying there. We're going to go visit her for a little while. And I was like, maybe I'll go to an escape room. But, you know, I've always had this like, you can't do that because you're in the place you can't go to the. It's like, it's maybe the way I think about going to a movie when you're on vacation, like, but it's but listening to you guys, honestly, now I'm like, oh no, I it's actually part of the scene, you know?

All right. You want me? You want to tell me one more thing? This is my one more thing.

Yes. What's your one more thing?

When you travel, do less of the things you have to do in that city. A lot of them suck. Like a lot of this stuff. It's just it's packed with tourists. Figure out what you care about, what weird thing you are going to enjoy and do it. And escape rooms are a really cool thing to add on because they're almost every major city in the world has a really great escape room in it, so it's something really special and you can't experience it anywhere else. There's nothing like this game except that it it just it just happens to be in that random city. Keep your eyes out for that kind of stuff. Find things off the beaten path. I like having a reason to travel. A thing that you care about, a thing that is special and it is weird. Adds so much more joy than getting yet another selfie in front of the thing that, yeah, billions of people have taken selfies in front of.

Okay. And the other thing I'll add is that by going to escape rooms in so many different cities, we've gotten off the beaten path to all sorts of interesting places that we never would have found. We've talked to the people who run the company or are just running the games that day. We've asked for a restaurant recommendation, went to someplace that locals go to, and had an experience that we never would have had by following the guidebook or, you know, whatever website.

Yeah, ended up in some strange residential neighborhood.

Yeah, all sorts of interesting stuff. Yeah.

I love it. Listen, I have really enjoyed talking to you both. I hope we can stay friends. I think that, like, our modeling is, really fantastic, for reasons that I just. I didn't really even, like, cut need to provide commentary, to be honest, because, they're just some principles and practices in place. And it starts honestly with the first thing you said, which is you just you start with kindness. If you're just kind, you can pretty much do anything, weather anything. Anyway. So, I'm glad to I'm glad we were able to make this connection. And I'm glad to share your, your story with the world that I live in. And tell me, tell them how to do that. How to how to officially connect with the two of you or with your your you're seeing your your business.

Thank you so much. I mean, I, I was saying to Lisa when we were filling out your form like I have, I never thought that I would be as happy and content in life and in and in relationship as I, with the relationship that we have and, I mean, we don't spend a lot of time thinking about the nuts and bolts of it, like, this is the most we've ever articulated. What we do as a as a unit. And it was it was just really interesting and fun for me.

I yeah, I think for me as well, we've haven't really thought about it so much. And I think that we have an unusual relationship that maybe wouldn't be right for everybody. You know, we run a business together and we're partners in life. And I think that might be hard for people and confusing for people, but it works so well for us. It works so great to be so passionate about the same thing together. And we both really enjoy that. And yeah, it's just been nice to reflect on how we enjoy that together.

Very cool. And if we want to learn more about you, where do we go?

Room escape artist.com. We got links to everything. If I am not annoying you. Reality escape pod I don't host it with Lisa. I have a co-host PG law. She's a two time survivor player. She's awesome. And, yeah.

You can follow us on whatever social media platform as well, and you can reach us at contact at Room Escape artist.com by email.

And that will go to Lisa.

Yep.

Very good. All right. Thanks guys for coming on. And, I look forward to whatever's next.

Like we're.

Having. Thanks for having us.