Collaborative Play at Work

Transcript - Collaborative Play at Work

Rich Rininsland: On this episode of Team Building Saves the World.

Markus Rüse: Often adults lose their talents to play or they just don’t do it anymore. And we bring them back to play and they don’t ask their colleagues. Even they don’t ask me. As a facilitator, I was never ignored on a team building event like that.

If you know the game, you know, there’s a point where violence comes into play.

Rich Rininsland: Hello team. It’s me. Your old friend, Rich Rininsland host of Team Building Saves the World. And I always wondered if you, my team out there have ever wondered what my favorite team building game is. Well, today we’re gonna learn all about Beat the Box with the founder and managing director of Spielgestalter, markus Rüse, but first I have to share some love with all of my supporters at TeamBonding.

If your team is ready to experience teamwork through the power of play, then visit TeamBonding.com to learn more. Now, team, let’s dig into the story behind my favorite game, how it best creates a strong team, and where AI and other technologies may influence the future of team building with our German partner, Markus Rüse.

Markus Rüse, thank you so much for coming on my friend, a fellow team building facilitator all the way from Germany. Thank you for being here.

Markus Rüse: Thank you for the invitation.

Rich Rininsland: Yeah. Once again, we’re around the world just like we’re back in the old days. It’s a great feeling for me.

It’s like flashbacks, but good ones.

Markus Rüse: Oh my God. Now I’m getting nervous.

Rich Rininsland: Well try not to. It’s just fun. Let’s start off, I’m gonna tell all of my team out there that you are responsible for one of my absolute favorite games. So we’re gonna talk about it because I love gushing over this game whenever I get a chance.

But first, we wanna learn more about you. Markus, what is it that made team building your life’s path?

Markus Rüse: I think it was not a straight way to come up there where I am, I’ve been to where I’ve now be. When I was a child, I loved playing around. I loved playing cards, I loved playing games, board games, computer games.

And in the early beginning, I wanted to be a developer of computer games. That was my start. But I thought, okay, if I wanna be a developer of computer games, I have to do the coding. And I wasn’t talented in doing the coding, so I thought, okay, I can’t go into that direction.

Rich Rininsland: Okay.

Markus Rüse: That’s a failure I know from today because there are people out there who are brilliant in coding and there are other people out there who are better in creating ideas of general ideas of games.

So that’s a star. If I go back in my memories, yes. I’m in Germany would say ” play child”. So still adult with addicted to games and I love playing.

Rich Rininsland: We are gonna get along great. That’s why this became my life’s path too. This was one of the only careers I could find where I get to play professionally. You know, I’m no good at sports. I couldn’t do sports that saved my life, so I make other people do that. But you are responsible for the creation, as I was saying, of my all time favorite game, Beat the Box. Can you just, for my team who might not be familiar with it, explain what Beat the Box is and how you came up with the idea.

Markus Rüse: Yeah. Beat the Box is, let’s say a mobile escape game.

And I think. Yeah, it is. Best description will be, it is a mobile escape game. You can play with groups of up to 600 people or 700 people because it’s broken down to smaller groups and yeah, there are a lot of hidden information in the game. You have to find and you have to solve a lot of riddles and to put these information together and collaborate to be successful at the end.

And yeah, maybe we, we talk about that structure of the game later.

Rich Rininsland: I gotta say, at least here in the States, I know it is a huge success. Everybody we’ve done it with, I’ve done it multiple times over the years since you guys released it, you came up with this during the pandemic, is that correct?

Markus Rüse: No, no.

Much earlier. We developed Beat the Box I would say 10 years ago. Oh, okay. Yeah. It’s already 10, at least nine years ago. And, the idea came up when the first escape rooms were raised around the world, and I saw some videos on YouTube and yeah, I was, stunned of the idea and started thinking about, of opening one escape room in Cologne.

And but there was no one to that time. So we had to fly to Vienna to see one of the first escape rooms in Europe. And yeah, when we came back that changed my point of view on on this game. I really enjoyed the escape room.

Rich Rininsland: Right.

Markus Rüse: And we sat down and with my former partner. We talked about, okay maybe it’s an option to open an escape room in Cologne. But then came an idea up to my head. What about creating a mobile version? And there was a mobile version some years later built on a big lorry. But I was thinking about something you can carry to the conference room.

Rich Rininsland: Mm-hmm.

Markus Rüse: And that was, or the early idea of, okay, let think about it. There’s nothing out there, nothing comparable. Maybe it’s an option to create something which is mobile and could be taken to the conference rooms.

Rich Rininsland: Fabulous. So what, what do you attribute to its success, especially globally, like so many people, for so many companies, this is a very popular choice.

Why do you think that is?

Markus Rüse: I think there are some points for the players. It’s yeah, it’s a cool experience because it’s, yeah, having an escape game brought to you in your conference room. You don’t know what is in the box. So you see a box and you want to know what is in there.

So people get yeah. What is the English word for curious. Curious. They get curious and want to know what is in there and I think it’s the start with a video makes it very easy to jump into the game. And one of the most important points, I think is, we only have two rules, maybe now three.

The first one is please don’t write down on all your materials, right? Please use a sheet of paper we gave you for that. The second is please don’t use any violence. Right? Everyone in the conference is laughing. When we tell that the people. But if you know the game, you know, there’s a point where violence comes into play. And now we have a third rule. We, when we say people, please don’t use ChatGPT . Because we tested it a lot and ChatGPT is yeah, very helpful to solve the riddles. But it takes a little bit the joy of finding out yourself from the challenge.

It’s like Jerry, our South African partner says, it’s like using Google in a quiz.

Rich Rininsland: Right? Exactly. Exactly.

I like telling people that it’s not going to help you or it won’t be a help for you. All you really need is to talk to each other. Because that’s the point.

That’s the point of what it is that we do.

Markus Rüse: Yeah, and I think the way, well, not the way, the point why it’s so successful for us as the deliverer of the team building experience is it scales very good. So you can play it with small groups from let’s say three people, or I had a group of five people last week.

They used it as a assessment center.

Rich Rininsland: Wow. Okay.

Markus Rüse: Or you can play it with 600 people. And for the players, it’s very cool to find out that it’s a collaborative game by themselves. So it’s all start as competitors every time. And yeah, it’s funny to see when people start collaborating, when do they find out that it’s a common goal?

And then that they only can succeed if they work together.

Rich Rininsland: It’s my favorite moment in the entire game because I never know what kind of response I’m going to get from the players. Whether it’s, “oh!”, You know, the light bulb goes off in their head. And for everybody out there who might be wondering what we’re talking about, the game is set up with you having the preconceived notion as the player that it’s my team versus every other team.

But what you find out during the course of the game is. They have information that you need and you have information that they need. And “oh, by the way, no one ever said it was you versus them”. At no point during the setup facilitators who do this in the future at no point do we actually have, can we actually say ” it’s you versus them”.

The only thing I do say that tends to put them in the competitive direction is I will say, “the team that brings me the answer is going to be the winning team”. And that makes them think, “okay, it is definitely us versus them”. But no, what I mean is you’re all one team at the end. Yeah. And if you don’t bring me the winning answer, you don’t beat the box.

It’s just that simple. So when they find out about the collaboration, it’s either their eyes light up and they’re really like. “Oh, okay. Now we’re getting it”. Or it’s the, “oh, come on”. Because especially here in the States, it’s still very much a head-to-head competitive kind of culture.

Markus Rüse: Yeah. And it strongly depends on which kind of teams you are playing with. If you are having sales team which is not used to collaborate in their work environment they are very, very disappointed. So we started. Putting that into our selling discussion with the clients that okay, this is a collaborative game. And we don’t know your group. If it’s a selling team, which is used to be very, very competitive, then it’s not the right game for you.

Rich Rininsland: Exactly. There has only been in the history of my running Beat the Box. There has only been one group that when they found out that it was a collaborative game, 90% of them stopped playing.

Literally. Yeah. They sat, they took themselves aside and they were like, “eh, I’m not into it”, but they were lawyers. They were barristers, so they were like, “no, our job is to go head to head against each other. There’s nothing you can tell me that’s gonna make me want to”, and it’s one of those, if I had thought about it beforehand, I would’ve been like, oh, maybe this isn’t the best game for you. But everyone else gets it for mistake.

Markus Rüse: I didn’t make an experience like that. Some other fun experiences when the boss who hired us for playing Beat the Box business team right, was the only person who wants to win the game until it ends and, who set his colleagues back to their tables with wrong information that was hard to debrief at the end and say…,

Rich Rininsland: I’ve had that too. I’ve had that too. Because there is a lot of information that needs to be shared and yeah, for everybody who knows inside of this, when you show up, you have this box on your table and inside this box there are four cases, and the first case in every game is the same.

From that point forward, you need information from other people, you need to share that information in order to get into every other case and make your final solution. And I have also had it happens here too, where people will try to mislead other teams, other groups to say like, “no, that’s not the right number for that. You need this number.” And I will literally say to them, “why did you do that? They can’t help you now. You’re not helping them, so they can’t help you.”

But let me get back to actually asking you, why do you think that, as a fellow playful youth who are now in adult bodies, why do you think this power of play that we all tend to exemplify works so well?

Markus Rüse: I think playing is one of the most natural human things we like to do. So all like to play. It’s easy to get people motivated to play a game. Rather than telling them, okay, we build, we bring a team building here. The reactions often is, “oh my God, there’s team building at the end. I have to do something.” But if you come into the room and say, “okay, we have a game for you.” The motivation is quite higher, and, during games, the masks come down. So you can look behind some masks of people and it’s not about a ranking in the company, right?

It’s a pure feeling. And maybe it’s cool because often adults lose their talents to play or they just don’t do it anymore. And we bring them back to play and make a lot of… funny and maybe, or some kind of frustrations and some kind of emotions they take from playing games. And I think that’s a important point.

Rich Rininsland: And what is it about the playfulness that we’re bringing them for their team building event that you think they can take forward with them so they can take back to their offices? They can take back to their nine to five every day.

Markus Rüse: I think what they experience in the game is quite similar to what they experience during their work time. What’s happening is often that departments work together very well, and department A says, “oh my God, the idiots from Department B, we are still waiting for their results”. And what’s not happening is that they share or offer help or maybe just ask why the results are not not already there, right?

I think, yeah, games and Beat the Box especially makes people feel things. They know from their company. But they can test different kind of strategies during the game.

Rich Rininsland: Mm.

Markus Rüse: They may be not able or not dare to test in their work environment. So can find out how it is yeah, to do in that way.

Rich Rininsland: So in that way, do you think from the beginning we should be intermixing these groups? Like is it better to randomize who goes where, or do you think you can actually start off with department, against department and their thinking and then have them work together?

Markus Rüse: I think both works. For the debrief at the end, it’s maybe a little bit different if you say, “okay, what did we experience?” Now we have different kind of departments and you don’t work together. You don’t share information. You don’t see that it’s a common goal you want to want to reach and that you have only success if you work together where do you know that problem from outside the conference room.

Rich Rininsland: Mm-hmm.

Markus Rüse: And, the funny thing is if you mix people up into new groups I think you will know from your own experience. You have, let’s say a table with seven and a table with four, and you go to the table with seven and say, “okay, can you please move to table four?”

“No. I’m now in Team seven. I just took my number and now I am a sevener”. So it goes very, very fast that people are in groups and in new groups, and then they defend their new group.

Rich Rininsland: Yep.

Markus Rüse: So we usually use numbers and give them to the people to randomize the teams and because lots of clients say, “okay. It’s good that people learn to know each other, who don’t know each other yet.”

Rich Rininsland: Right. And that’s saying a lot when you’re talking about 600 different teams, that maximum that you’re talking about. I am very fortunate in the fact that I have maybe 10 to 25.

There was one time I did 300, and as exciting as it was to see that mass of a number all working. It was, it’s a, it’s easier on my end to manage the smaller numbers and help them to see what it is that they’re doing while they’re doing it. But it still all works beautifully.

For anybody out there who’s still wondering whether we need the big number or the small numbers, it still works the exact same either way.

Markus Rüse: Yeah.

Rich Rininsland: My favorite is because it is literally an experience about thinking outside of the literal box.

Markus Rüse: Yes. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It’s thinking outside the box. It brings thinking outside the box to your table.

Rich Rininsland: To the point where I often point out when we do our wrap up, when we do our final conversation with the groups, I often point out, especially if we have more than five teams that…

’cause for, again, for the teams out there who might be thinking about buying this for their corporation, it’s always teams of five. It’s always broken down into teams of five. You have to have multiples of five teams, whether you’re doing…

Markus Rüse: No, you don’t have to.

Rich Rininsland: Oh. The way we do it, we keep it very simple.

Markus Rüse: But it is very simple to play with, let’s say six groups. Okay. I played yesterday with a group of German soccer players from the first Women’s Bundeslig club. They were in the trainings camp and the team manager hired us for playing Beat the Box with them.

Rich Rininsland: Okay.

Markus Rüse: And he said, “okay we are here to, to find out team experience and to build up team experience for the beginning of the season”.

And they played Beat the Box and it was a group of 30 people. So we choose six boxes and group size of five per box. And you just have to looked at the information are all hidden in the game, right? And you can easily spread them up to, let’s say, three boxes, or even six boxes, or as I mentioned before when we played with seven people, it was two teams, one of three, one of five four people. And we split up the information they need at the end on two boxes only.

It was possible to only use two boxes and to be successful at the end.

Rich Rininsland: Cool. Cool. Very workable. Excellent. I love that. Yeah. That is very alterable. I enjoy that.

We don’t actually do that. But it’s good to know that we can if we need to.

Markus Rüse: Yeah. Funny. It, it is really hard to see if you have only two teams sitting two meters beside each other and they solve the riddles from case one, as you mentioned. They now need information from the other teams, which is there is only one other team.

And they do not start cooperating, they start searching the whole room because they are missing information. But they don’t ask their colleagues. Even they don’t ask me as a facilitator, I was never ignored on a team building event like that.

In the background after that I told them “I was never ignored”, like normally people come and, “Hey, can you help us? And what is the solution? Is it this right way?” And you have to decide are you helping them? Too much or, or not. But especially this team, they did not cooperate and it took at least a very long 12 minutes. They start, they searched around under every chair, under every table.

And then they send a spy to the other teams who was faking like drinking coffee and watching on the other table. And they all added their their results. And the funny thing was we had a coach in the room, who did the training with the group for three days and the day, the training they had for the last three days was how important it is to cooperate the foundation.

And that team building is that team is everything. So fantastic. That was a strange experience for him.

Rich Rininsland: Yeah. And I see that even in a normal run of play where once they realize that “that team has information I need, I’m gonna go get that information” and “oh, ha we have information they need.”

I’ll even give them that information. But they immediately go right back to their tables still.

Markus Rüse: Still. I just want wanted to ask you if you experience the same.

Rich Rininsland: yeah. And it is literally just, they can’t get out of the mindset that “this is my team here”. Now there. Oh. And then I cannot tell you how many times I have heard from one team or the other.

“Why are they so slow? I need their information, but they’re so much slower than we are.” And I go, “then why aren’t you helping them?”

Markus Rüse: It’s so funny.

Rich Rininsland: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it is hilarious. And I have to tell you, for anybody out there who’s not a team building facilitator. It’s so much fun being us people.

I mean, not only do we already know the answer to all the puzzles, but just helping everybody, holding people…

Markus Rüse: We’re the wise guy.

Rich Rininsland: Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. So I wanna go back to something you had mentioned before where you had said that ChatGPT is something that can help. In other ways, do you think AI might actually be able to help us when designing team building?

Or even creating new methodologies for team building.

Markus Rüse: Both definitely. Yes. If I see my workflow now, it is hard to imagine not using ChatGPT anymore. Because you have an idea, you put it into, you get a response. You have a high motivated colleague who is willing to work with you, whole day. And even if not every suggestion from ChatGPT is good. It brings new ideas to my head and said, okay, that’s good. That’s not. So I really use it a lot in developing processes. And yes, it’s a massive tool and the next point is, yes, we are strongly in developing AI team buildings where teams use AI as a tool to break down barriers, to come into contact with ChatGPT to see what’s what’s possible with AI and, and large language models.

Lot of people don’t know, A lot of people have heard about ChatGPT, but do not know how to, how to get how to, to use it. Right. And so we designed one to three different AI team buildings right now, which are quite successful in Germany. One is the AI Music Award. So where you use ChatGPT to create your band name, to create lyrics and, the second one is picture creating software. I forgot the name.

So you have to create a CD cover for your song, and then you film yourself and you have SUNO as an AI who makes music from lyrics.

Rich Rininsland: Yeah.

Markus Rüse: And the result is fantastic. ‘Cause you see what AI can do for you, what it can’t do for you. And it’s a highly fun orient and motivating team building event with very fun results.

Rich Rininsland: Excellent. And there’s, I don’t know what it’s like in Germany, but here in the States there’s still a lot of… I wanna say a stigma around AI, where people are afraid that people are using it too much.

Markus Rüse: Yeah. Yes, definitely. It’s the same as the Germany. 90% of people I talk to I’m very enthusiastic and say, “wow, have you seen this?” And “it can do this for you”. People say, “oh, I’m afraid. I’m afraid it’ll overtake all of our jobs. It’ll overtake the word at the end”. I don’t know it, but I don’t think so. I use it a lot and yeah, I’m always surprised how fast the development meant goes and how fast the steps are coming closer.

Rich Rininsland: Do you think the team building is actually a good methodology for helping people get past that fear, that concern about what a block like ChatGPT would actually do for them?

Markus Rüse: I think it’s a brilliant message to bring that to life, to your employees, to your colleagues, to just have a playful setting. And, you just can test it and see it.

And if you have a colleague who already knows it he’s not blaming you. He can explain it to you. And you just can’t get into contact with it.

I remember when we started 10 years ago, iPads came up.

Rich Rininsland: Yeah.

Markus Rüse: And I remember that moment when we gave them, handled them to teams. For the Urban Challenge GPS really outside in the city, and I remember people were saying, ah, this is the iPad I’ve heard so much from. And they started exploring it and, ” ah, this is one of the apps I heard from”. Hard to imagine that it’s only 10 years ago, but yeah, that’s how it started. And we bring these app based entertainment to people and yeah, we were often, the first contact they had with iPads or iPad based games.

Rich Rininsland: It is amazing to me how you’re right. I mean, just thinking about it was only 10 years ago maybe that we started using these on such a global scale.

But now they’re just so superfluous in our life. They’re just everywhere. Yeah. And even, I mean, just think of smartphones as smaller iPads. That’s really all that it is. It’s all just the same thing. And it’s so innocuous now. It is so a part of everyday life.

Markus Rüse: If you’re looking for a, very, really, really big challenge? Let your cell phone at home and go to work.

Rich Rininsland: Yep. No, thank you. I’m not sure I could drive anymore without my cell phone.

Markus Rüse: Leave it at home when you go for camping on the weekend, just imagine.

Rich Rininsland: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, my father, when I was young, one of his favorite things to do was to take us in a car.

My brother and I especially take us in a car, take us for a long, long drive. And then pull over to the side of the road and say, okay, tell me how to get home. And it was his way of developing a sense of direction in us. But nowadays, and I had such a great sense of direction, but nowadays, if I don’t have my GPS on my phone, I don’t know where I’m going.

I don’t know where anything is. You want me to have a road Atlas in my trunk. Come on.

Markus Rüse: Yeah. We sometimes face the experience if the battery breaks from your, cell phone. You are sitting in the car and want to go to a friend you haven’t seen for a long time. And you ask yourself, Hmm, how can I get there?

Okay. I could ask other people on the street if we did in the, in the early, early years.

Rich Rininsland: Exactly. Exactly. So let, let’s talk about what you think the future might look like for team building and for companies trying to reshape their culture because while team building, thank God is the success that it is, it is still one of those things where I have met a bunch of companies who were like, “oh, team building for us was going out and having drinks as a group. And that’s team building. We never even thought we could do anything like this”. So what do we think the future is going to look like for team building? Or what do we want to build the future to be since honestly, it seems to be really in our hands to make that happen.

Markus Rüse: I think everything starts with a question.

What do we want to stand for? If you ask CEOs for companies what does your company stand for? Or what should it stand for? What are your values? And if you don’t answer that question you can book team building activity, but it does not make a big difference if you just go to the lake and set a of beer there and let’s get drunk.

Or visit the cinema with all your colleagues. So if you want to to have a community of working people used to work together to communicate, it means you have to set up a work environment where criticism is common and not… sometimes if you, if you go to your boss and say, “oh, I don’t agree with you, I go in a different difficult talk. And he doesn’t want you to do that, then cooperative team building is maybe not the right program. You should book it. So team building has to fit the values companies stand for.

So we can make things visible with team buildings. And after that you need a coach to change it. I don’t think that team building is, there to change behavior from people. But you can make it visible and after that you can see it as a responsible people and say a responsible person who booked the team building and said, okay, I wanna work on that.

For an example, I think you experienced the same thing when you play Beat the Box with a group. I can say if I want to work in that team after they finished.

Rich Rininsland: Yeah. Yep.

Markus Rüse: And that’s a really, really big point if people lied to each other and hide information and laugh to each other when one team is late opening the box or the cases.

Yes, it’s a game, but it tells a lot of the people. And the other way around we had a team building activity with 25 women all assistant to the CEOs in a big big consulting company.

Rich Rininsland: Okay.

Markus Rüse: And after 10 minutes, one of them climbed the table, took a flip chart and was shouting through the whole conference room. This is a team building activity. We have to work together. I will collect the results on this, on this board here. And they finished 25 minutes later. So yeah. Yeah. One of the greatest experiences I had. Beat the Box, they say, “oh wow. That was early collaboration.”

Rich Rininsland: Yeah, I had a very similar experience that wasn’t with Beat the Box, it was another scenario, another game we were playing. I don’t even tell you what the game was, just to tell you that I explained how the game worked. I explained what was expected of the teams and how everything would best function for them if you know that it was mostly about communication and about cooperation.

And immediately upon my saying, “go”, the CEO of the company stood up and said, “okay, people, here’s how this is gonna work. We’re gonna do X, Y, and Z. We’re gonna do this, this, this, and this. I wanna see everybody getting together on this.” And I’m sitting there going. “So team building to you is just do what I say”

Needless to say, they got finished in time, but it was not to the extent that they wanted it to be. And then at the end, the CEO came up to me. Yeah. And, and he was like…

Markus Rüse: And that is one, one going back to the values.

Rich Rininsland: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And to his credit, he came up to me at the end and he said: “that didn’t work as I wanted it to.” And I was like, “okay, why do you think it didn’t?” He goes, “is it because I took over and kind of ran the show?” And I was like, “that might’ve had something to do with it. But it was also the fact that you got them started in the direction you wanted them to take, but you never followed through. You never kept it up. You never made sure that everybody was doing what you wanted them to do. You kind of just stood to the side and watched what they were doing, and that didn’t help anybody.”

Markus Rüse: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes, it makes things visible. If you play with people. Even if you play with friends a card game at night and after six beer, someone starts cheating or someone writes the wrong numbers on the sheet of paper to win. So yeah, the masks fall if you, if you’re going to play in a private situation or on a team building event.

Rich Rininsland: So speaking of the future though, is there anything coming up for you guys that you’re either developing or excited to get your hands on? What is the next big thing that, if you can give us a spoiler about it, that you want to put out?

Markus Rüse: Yeah, I think the next big thing is a program we I started working on is a collaborative team building event where AI is your colleague. Okay. So let’s say, onboarding AI event that people get into, in play into the situation to, to take these AI thing and integrated in their team as a team member.

Rich Rininsland: Excellent. I look forward to it.

Markus Rüse: Yeah, it will mean not very, very easy.

The environment will maybe be alien versus AI. So there’s a threat aliens will conquer the world. And you have to defend that. And yeah, you only can do that using AI in that program. You have to use it. But the most important thing or the message from the game should be “okay, AI helps you solving problems quicker, solving problems you maybe are not able to solve, but it’s a human decision, what to do with that information, how to combine them and to combine them to collaborate, to put them together to a big thing, to set the goal in the game”.

And I think we will experience that in the future that a colleague comes in and said, “okay, I let me introduce your new colleague Mr. Spock.” And when we were children we dreamt of having a computer like on the enterprise, not just ” hey, computer” asking something, and he answers you. We now have that and it’s so normal right now that talking to ChatGPT on the phone when I’m driving to an event, I’m talking to ChatGPT on the phone.

It is so normal. And it is, yeah, the future will be that we will have that and face that in a lot of situations in work environments. And so it will be good to implement these AI team members in the future.

Rich Rininsland: I look forward to it.

Markus Rüse: Maybe it’s a little bit too early.

We were very, very early with our AI programs in Germany. I was very proud. We were the first company where them in their portfolio, but nobody would booked it. And now one year later it starts picking up, getting momentum with AI.

Rich Rininsland: Excellent. Excellent. Markus Rüse of  Spielgestalter, thank you so much for coming on today.

Did you have a good time?

Markus Rüse: Yeah, I had a good time. Thank you for being here. It was quite fun.

Rich Rininsland: Excellent. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. My team out there. Give Markus great big hand of round of applause. This is my own version of my own ChatGPT. A bunch of people sitting under my desk, but I hope you continue to have a good time, my friend, because I did warn you in the beginning.

It is time now form a speed round.

Alright, Markus, just to remind you what I told you about before we came on the air the speed round is very simple. I’m gonna play music that just goes on for 60 seconds. During that time, I’m gonna ask you a series of very simple questions.

The objective is to answer as quickly as you can. And if you wanna make this a challenge we have actually beaten 17 questions asked in 60 seconds. So it’s a team thing…

Markus Rüse: I wonder what type of questions this will be.

Rich Rininsland: Well, you’re not supposed to have the questions, so we’re gonna see, and hopefully, we’ll, how well we do.

It’s just fun. Remember? It’s fun. This is what we do for fun. All right. You’ll hear the music. I’ll ask the first question and, away we go…

What’s your name?

Markus Rüse: Markus.

Rich Rininsland: Do you have any kids?

Markus Rüse: No.

Rich Rininsland: Do you have any pets?

Markus Rüse: No.

Rich Rininsland: Okay. What was your dream job when you were a child?

Markus Rüse: Computer game designer.

Rich Rininsland: If you could work remotely from anywhere in the world, where would you choose?

Markus Rüse: Hm, the Alps.

Rich Rininsland: What was your first job?

Markus Rüse: My first job was delivering medicine to pharmaceutical companies.

Rich Rininsland: Favorites TV series of all time?

Markus Rüse: Dallas

Rich Rininsland: Best career advice you ever received.

Markus Rüse: Pardon?

Rich Rininsland: Best career advice you’ve ever received.

Markus Rüse: Do what you love.

Rich Rininsland: Excellent. Name a time when you left really hard.

Markus Rüse: I did not get the question.

Rich Rininsland: Name a time when you’ve laughed really hard.

Markus Rüse: When I saw the Naked Cannon with Liam Neeson.

Rich Rininsland: Excellent. That’s a good one. I like that one. You got 12 pal, so you didn’t, but a lot of it is the translation issue in the distance.

So yeah, I’ll count that as very good. So there’s some more applause for you, Markus. In case my team out there…. because goodness knows somebody from Germany might be hearing this right now, is there a way that they can find you or an easy way to reach out to you or  Spielgestalter?

Markus Rüse: Yes, as another way to find us due to the internet thing you might be heard from under  Spielgestalter.de you find our company’s website with a big portfolio of fun team building events, not only Beat the Box, indoor events, auto events, AI events, hybrid events, online events.

So we have a very big portfolio of fun-based activities for every need.

Rich Rininsland: Excellent. Thank you very much, pal. Hopefully I’ll get to talk to you again real soon in the future. Thanks for coming.

Markus Rüse: Yes, it will be fine.