Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's going to be weird to do
Speaker 2: an entro, but like it's the Money Stuff podcast. We're
Speaker 2: here today with I think our second episode with a guest.
Speaker 3: Yes, two guests, Our second and third guests.
Speaker 2: Second and third guests. They are Ryan Patch and John
Speaker 2: Seal of the Great Gotham Challenge, two creators of puzzle hunts. Welcome.
Speaker 1: That's about all you need to say. We make puzzle hunts.
Speaker 2: We got in touch because I am a degenerate puzzle
Speaker 2: hunter in my way, and Ryan and John are taking
Speaker 2: over or sort of have taken over the big financial
Speaker 2: industry puzzle hunt that I have done occasionally, which is
Speaker 2: sometimes called Compass but is mostly called Midnight Madness and
Speaker 2: runs overnight this year in October. So welcome and Ryan,
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 4: Happy to be here.
Speaker 1: Coming soon to New York City street near you.
Speaker 2: This is a podcast probably about money stuff related to money.
Speaker 3: That's what we build it as.
Speaker 2: It's not always true, but that's kind of what we say.
Speaker 2: And it has a listenership that includes a lot of
Speaker 2: financial industry and tech industry people, and the overlap of
Speaker 2: that audience with people who do puzzle hunts is meaningful,
Speaker 2: but it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
Speaker 2: And so I kind of want to explain what a
Speaker 2: puzzle hunt is. And I feel like you guys might
Speaker 2: say that you're something other than puzzle hunt guys exactly,
Speaker 2: But I really want to explain what puzzles are. So
Speaker 2: can I prompt you with that?
Speaker 4: I think sometime in the nineties, maybe before the Mit
Speaker 4: mystery un started, I get the sense that that was
Speaker 4: the beginning of the industry that we are weirdly a
Speaker 4: part of, largely by accident, I would say, because when
Speaker 4: Ryan and I decided to start sinning puzzle hunts, we
Speaker 4: weren't aware of any of the existing ones. We thought
Speaker 4: we were making something that no one had ever heard
Speaker 4: of before. A puzzle hunt in definition doesn't have to
Speaker 4: be location based, but in our case, and in many cases,
Speaker 4: it's a location based hunt in which people travel from
Speaker 4: place to place solve a complex puzzle. And by puzzle,
Speaker 4: I don't mean jigsaw puzzle, but they receive a series
Speaker 4: of clues and pieces of information that have to be
Speaker 4: combined in some way and thought of laterally in order
Speaker 4: to yield a solution. And that solution will often take
Speaker 4: them to a new place and they'll kind of repeat
Speaker 4: that process. Maybe people are familiar with the Amazing Race,
Speaker 4: combining elements of something like the Amazing Race with elements
Speaker 4: of an escape room and all into a competition in
Speaker 4: which people are competing against each other most of the
Speaker 4: time in small teams to prove their metal and arrive
Speaker 4: at the end first or with the highest standing that
Speaker 4: they can.
Speaker 2: I became aware of puzzle hunts before I became aware
Speaker 2: of escape rooms, And I don't know if that's like
Speaker 2: the actual chronology in the world where like people and.
Speaker 3: My experience, Yeah, well, puzzle.
Speaker 2: Hunts are pretty niche, but.
Speaker 1: The escape rooms came after puzzle hunts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why I was like that they sort of
Speaker 2: grew out of the puzzle hunt idea and like you
Speaker 2: could put an escape room in a place and sell
Speaker 2: it to people every day rather than do it once
Speaker 2: a year.
Speaker 1: And the escape rooms are definitely a little more consumer oriented,
Speaker 1: whereas a puzzle hunt you have to be a certain
Speaker 1: glutton for punishment or at least intellectual stimula. You know,
Speaker 1: escape rooms are great because you know, at the end
Speaker 1: of sixty minutes you're done whereas a puzzle hunt, if
Speaker 1: you fail, you're floundering in the middle of some urban
Speaker 1: landscape trying to figure out where to go.
Speaker 2: Next at three am. Often.
Speaker 4: But you know, what I would say is that I
Speaker 4: think escape rooms and puzzle hunts share an origin story
Speaker 4: I would guess, which is that it's people saying, what
Speaker 4: if we could be in a video game in real life.
Speaker 4: So it's kind of taking this idea of a quest
Speaker 4: and something to be solved and creating a real life
Speaker 4: experience around that, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: What differentiates a puzzle hunt from a scavenger hunt or
Speaker 3: is that just a meaningless distinction?
Speaker 1: Is the puzzles absolutely you get.
Speaker 3: Clues and you have to think critically, and scavenger hunts.
Speaker 1: There's definitely a blurry line between the two. But I
Speaker 1: think that the puzzle hunts are often once you arrive
Speaker 1: at a location, you're not just there to find something.
Speaker 1: You're there to solve a complex situation. And there's pen
Speaker 1: and paper puzzle hunts where you just like go to
Speaker 1: a location and you're given a few pieces of paper
Speaker 1: and they're all kind of these very crossworthy or language
Speaker 1: based or math based puzzles that you wind up solving
Speaker 1: and then they result to a keyword or often the
Speaker 1: next location that you're going to, and then you go
Speaker 1: to the next location, you get handed in another set
Speaker 1: of papers, so there's always some very specific activity. Now,
Speaker 1: we came kind of this from more the immersion angle.
Speaker 1: We kind of asked ourselves the question to look like
Speaker 1: if people felt like they were in a movie, and
Speaker 1: then we started creating these quests and then we realized, well,
Speaker 1: to kind of unlock the door that kind of lets
Speaker 1: you into the next thing, there needs to be a puzzle.
Speaker 1: And so we kind of came at it from a
Speaker 1: little more of an angle saying, well, we need to
Speaker 1: have a key for that door, we need to have
Speaker 1: a password for that door, and started slowly integrating puzzles.
Speaker 1: So we kind of backed into the puzzle hunt community
Speaker 1: from more of like an immersive angle, whereas the puzzle
Speaker 1: hunt community has then kind of been pulled a little
Speaker 1: more into the immersive community through escape rooms, through immersive theater.
Speaker 1: And then you have, yeah, the scavenger hunt community, which
Speaker 1: is kind of geocaching adjacent and just making hunts for
Speaker 1: your ten year old kids adjacent, and scavenger Hunt the
Speaker 1: worst version of a scavenger hunt is like take pictures
Speaker 1: of five out of state license plates, or like you know,
Speaker 1: get a photo of a person with a beard, and
Speaker 1: is kind of our guiding light that we move away from.
Speaker 4: We draw a distinction in our world between puzzles and tasks,
Speaker 4: and a puzzle is it requires some sort of lateral thinking,
Speaker 4: and a task is just an action that you complete.
Speaker 4: So I think a lot of scavenger hunts are task
Speaker 4: based versus a puzzle requires you to use your brain
Speaker 4: in a different way.
Speaker 2: Do you have like a classic puzzle or like a
Speaker 2: form of puzzle, or a way to describe more concretely
Speaker 2: what the puzzles and puzzle hunts are, because like to
Speaker 2: me and I have not I don't think done your
Speaker 2: challenges that I think I did Midnight Matter Compass that
Speaker 2: might have been partly your doing. And I have a sense,
Speaker 2: like an inarticulate sense of what puzzle hunt puzzles feel
Speaker 2: like you know, I've done I don't know, four or
Speaker 2: five puzzle hunts and an escape room or two. But like,
Speaker 2: how do you think about puzzles? And like what is
Speaker 2: a puzzle? And like what kinds of things are puzzles?
Speaker 2: Could you give a puzzle that we can talk about
Speaker 2: on a podcast.
Speaker 4: Sure, I think every puzzle hunt has its own tradition
Speaker 4: of how it defines a puzzle. And Ryan and I
Speaker 4: are the first people to be in charge of the
Speaker 4: Midnight Madness tradition, kind of coming from the outside, not
Speaker 4: having played and not being from the finance industry. So
Speaker 4: we had to do our homework and spend a lot
Speaker 4: of time learning what's a puzzle by the definition of
Speaker 4: Midnight Madness. And one thing that we identified is each
Speaker 4: one should involve a logical leap, so there's typically a
Speaker 4: mental connection that you make between two different types of information.
Speaker 4: So an example of a puzzle that I think is
Speaker 4: a good illustration of this from an event that we
Speaker 4: did a few years ago, was designed by our friend
Speaker 4: Josh Dabner, and it's a puzzle in which you receive
Speaker 4: a rap sheet that looks like a police description of
Speaker 4: several perpetrators of criminals, and each one has a description
Speaker 4: and then picture of what looks like a fingerprint for
Speaker 4: each one, but you use clues in the descriptions, and
Speaker 4: you use clues of what the visual of the fingerprint
Speaker 4: looks like to act you make a connection that you're
Speaker 4: not looking at fingerprints, You're looking at topographical maps of mountains,
Speaker 4: and each one you discover as you kind of read
Speaker 4: through the text and look for words that might seem
Speaker 4: out of place and kind of evidence that the descriptions
Speaker 4: are not quite fitting well to like how a policeman
Speaker 4: might describe a criminal. To recognize that each of the
Speaker 4: seven is representing the seven highest peaks on each continent.
Speaker 4: And so then you use that information to go back
Speaker 4: to the first descriptions, and in there you work with
Speaker 4: the information. You have to yield a final solution, which
Speaker 4: is a key word. But in order to do that,
Speaker 4: you have to be able to make this mental leap
Speaker 4: and recognize that one thing is actually representing another.
Speaker 3: How do you make them difficult without being infuriating? Because
Speaker 3: this is something different. But Bloomberg has a weekly quiz quiz.
Speaker 3: Go Matt, you've played it, you've written. I used to
Speaker 3: be the cure of the quiz, and one of the
Speaker 3: metrics on which I judged myself was by how many
Speaker 3: people who started the quiz completed the quiz. And there
Speaker 3: was like this fine balance I had to find between
Speaker 3: making it challenging but not making it annoying. So how
Speaker 3: do you find that balance when you're putting together puzzles
Speaker 3: and make sure that people basically don't rage quit.
Speaker 4: Yes, you're our sister in pain, I see.
Speaker 1: I think that's the number one skill of a good
Speaker 1: puzzle creator. I think that right there is the magic
Speaker 1: sauce is figuring out something that's just hard enough that
Speaker 1: makes people really feel like they've gone on a journey
Speaker 1: and they were just about to quit, but then they
Speaker 1: had that spark of inspiration that turned it all around
Speaker 1: for them, and then everything fell into place. And then
Speaker 1: looking back on it, it's like, of course that was
Speaker 1: the answer. It could never have not been that answer,
Speaker 1: and bringing people on that journey and allowing them to
Speaker 1: go on that journey themselves, and then by the end
Speaker 1: of it having that I heard it recently described as
Speaker 1: I think secondhand fun or second degree fun, where it's
Speaker 1: it sucked in the moment, but when you look back
Speaker 1: on it, it's a pleasureful thing. And so creating that
Speaker 1: moment it's very difficult, and we've struggled with it. And
Speaker 1: you know, we created the Great Gotham Challenge. I created
Speaker 1: the first one by myself. John was a participant, This
Speaker 1: is how we started working together, and no one finished it.
Speaker 1: Everyone raged quick. It was in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 1: The stock market had crashed. I just graduated college and
Speaker 1: couldn't get a job, and so me and another friend
Speaker 1: created this and it was supposed to be like a
Speaker 1: four hour thing. Everyone just texted us after our four
Speaker 1: and it like I am a quarter of the way through,
Speaker 1: Please put a bullet in my head. And so it's
Speaker 1: just like, okay, come to the finish line. But anyways,
Speaker 1: we've gotten better. We've been doing this for about eleven years.
Speaker 1: And a lot of it is play testing, Like we
Speaker 1: have a community of people. They just play test our
Speaker 1: puzzles and they time themselves and we make sure we
Speaker 1: know how long a puzzle should take and what the
Speaker 1: right deviation is. And it's also a lot of argument,
Speaker 1: like we've just got a people that we really trust
Speaker 1: and who have done a lot of these things, and
Speaker 1: someone says this is way too hard, this is way
Speaker 1: too easy, and we just go twelve rounds until we
Speaker 1: find something that we all agree on and we trust
Speaker 1: each other. So part of it's not working in a vacuum,
Speaker 1: and part of it's just a lot of experience and
Speaker 1: part of its playtesting. John and I are creative by nature,
Speaker 1: and we brought in an operations person to help run
Speaker 1: our company named Teresa, who's brilliant and has saved our
Speaker 1: company many times. But one of the things she instigated
Speaker 1: is no, we play test things. We play test things thoroughly.
Speaker 2: I think another part of the answer to Katie's question
Speaker 2: is is when I've done puzzle hunts, there's some sort
Speaker 2: of like hint mechanism where you can, like without fully
Speaker 2: giving up, you can give up a little and get
Speaker 2: some sort of help like can you talking about how
Speaker 2: do you think about that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's interesting because we've seen this done different ways,
Speaker 1: and in the Midnight Madness puzzle hunt that we stage
Speaker 1: every other year for the finance industry, there's kind of
Speaker 1: a bespoke, personalized what's called game controller who meters out hints.
Speaker 2: It's like your personal tormentor.
Speaker 1: Right right exactly. And this is something very unique about
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Vibe is that the game controllers are
Speaker 1: known to be a little malicious and a little kount
Speaker 1: of Because we've been kind of apprenticing with the current
Speaker 1: creators for the last four years and we've taken it
Speaker 1: over this year, and so we've watched them and tried
Speaker 1: to learn, and we've been like, this seems weird, this
Speaker 1: seems mean, and they're like, oh no, it's what people want,
Speaker 1: Like it's the it's what the players want. That's done
Speaker 1: in a very like bespoke, handcrafted concierge way, both the
Speaker 1: hinting and the tormenting, Whereas like on our Great Gotham
Speaker 1: Challenge branded puzzle hunts that we do, there's kind of
Speaker 1: a unified, pre canned hint system that you know, when
Speaker 1: you feel like you're at a dead end, you can
Speaker 1: take a hint and there's a certain time penalty, and
Speaker 1: we've introduced a fun gamified mechanic where the longer you're
Speaker 1: on a puzzle, the less penalty time you get. And so, yeah,
Speaker 1: there absolutely needs to be a hint system, and that's
Speaker 1: absolutely a way that you keep people within the same universe.
Speaker 1: If there was no hint system, then you'd see devations
Speaker 1: of two hundred percent on times.
Speaker 2: My experience of like Compass or Midnight Matis is like
Speaker 2: if you're like getting on the subway to go to
Speaker 2: the wrong burrow, your game control will be like hold
Speaker 2: on right, Yeah, there's some amount of like, don't do
Speaker 2: something really stupid, and.
Speaker 1: That's the Yeah, that's that's the designer's job is to, yeah,
Speaker 1: figuring out how to let people fail enough that they
Speaker 1: go through those peaks and valleys of emotions, but not
Speaker 1: letting them fail so much that they're just destroyed.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You want to feel like you can fail so
Speaker 2: that when you succeed, you feel good about it.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Can we talk about Midnight madnas. I've written about having
Speaker 2: done one or two Compass on Switch. My understanding is
Speaker 2: that like at some point a kind of Goldman Sachs
Speaker 2: affiliated group of Wall Street people started a Midnight Madness
Speaker 2: puzzle hunt, possibly named after a movie of the same name,
Speaker 2: and it was called Midnight Madness because it started I
Speaker 2: don't know four pm and went until two pm the
Speaker 2: next day.
Speaker 1: Everything you've heard is correct, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2: And it was run by I think Alicia we wasel
Speaker 2: at Goldman and then it became so overwhelming that my
Speaker 2: understanding was like the winners got to run it the
Speaker 2: next time, and I know, like Colin Tykel ran it
Speaker 2: for a while, and that is like, in my understanding,
Speaker 2: the premiere like Wall Street Puzzle Hunt and all of
Speaker 2: the teams are like eight Goldman teams and six Chain
Speaker 2: Street teams. Is that basically correct?
Speaker 4: Most of that's correct. Alisha designed it for I think
Speaker 4: maybe a decade or a little less, and at some
Speaker 4: point I think he decided it was too much for
Speaker 4: him to continue and just decided, I can't keep doing this.
Speaker 4: I need to quit. And the team that won the
Speaker 4: year that he called his final year decided that they
Speaker 4: loved the game too much to let it die, so
Speaker 4: they said, we'll take over. We'll put it under a
Speaker 4: different name so that people recognize that it's under new management.
Speaker 4: They ran it for several years, and then they decided,
Speaker 4: we can't keep doing this. It's destroying our lives and
Speaker 4: our relationships because.
Speaker 2: All of these people have like real jobs in the
Speaker 2: financial industry and also extracurricularly designed these insane all night
Speaker 2: puzzle hunts.
Speaker 1: As opposed to us who have fake jobs in the
Speaker 1: financial industry. Yes, that's correct. Now we have real jobs
Speaker 1: in puzzle hunts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, So this is your job, it's not their job.
Speaker 1: Is a little more sustainable for us, but yes, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know how they could possibly do it, because
Speaker 1: this is my full time job. It already is so
Speaker 1: hard for me. I can't imagine working at a hedge
Speaker 1: fund while simultaneously doing this.
Speaker 2: So you guys are professional puzzle hunt makers and they
Speaker 2: are professional headsphund matters. As you look at their work,
Speaker 2: what do you think were they good at it? If
Speaker 2: you have like the regular puzzle HNK community and then
Speaker 2: you have like the headshund guys, is there a different
Speaker 2: style or mindset.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's something that Ryan and I were just discussing. Actually,
Speaker 4: there are things that are unique to it. There are
Speaker 4: ways that maybe we look at things a bit differently.
Speaker 4: For instance, talking about hints, Ryan and I, as puzzle
Speaker 4: of designers, we kind of believe that a really well
Speaker 4: designed puzzle should be able to be completed by a
Speaker 4: good puzzler without needing to be hinted in any way,
Speaker 4: Whereas I think they're coming from a world in which
Speaker 4: they feel like if it's not hard enough to require
Speaker 4: someone to take hints, then it's not hard enough. So
Speaker 4: that's been an adjustment I think for us to kind
Speaker 4: of recognize.
Speaker 1: We're a little more bread crumb, that leap of logic
Speaker 1: in a way that like at the end of a
Speaker 1: good murder mystery, you look back and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: the hints were always there that it was the butler,
Speaker 1: and so we're a little more on that end versus Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're more like, you have to make this leap of
Speaker 1: logic with no prior red crumb.
Speaker 2: I'm with you. I've had some Midnight Madness experiences where
Speaker 2: you're like, you get the hnt in your No one
Speaker 2: would have gotten that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Another big distinction though that we've come to terms with
Speaker 4: though that I think is really interesting and says a lot.
Speaker 4: And we didn't believe this to be true when we started,
Speaker 4: but I think we've come around to the idea that
Speaker 4: the people who are attracted to this midnight Madness game
Speaker 4: who come from Wall Street, they do crave I hesitate
Speaker 4: to use the word glutton for punishment, but they they
Speaker 4: do crave a certain amount of intensity and some would
Speaker 4: even say torture that I think was surprising to us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, just the fact that it is sort
Speaker 2: of runs overnight is right cruel in a way.
Speaker 3: It's like endurance athletics, but with your mind and your body.
Speaker 2: Totally. Yeah, you have a day job running puzzle hunts
Speaker 2: under your own brand, and like puzzle hunt activity is
Speaker 2: for corporate clients. Right, My sense is that a lot
Speaker 2: of your clients are also in the financial industry, and
Speaker 2: like puzzle hunting and finance overlap a lot. Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yes, you're onto us. We didn't mean to do it
Speaker 1: that way, but the market found us. Yeah.
Speaker 2: What do you think it is about? Like financial people
Speaker 2: a puzzle hunts? Like where do they go together?
Speaker 4: Several things? One is, I think the finance industry and
Speaker 4: the tech industry have become really closely intertwined. And as
Speaker 4: I said, the tradition of the MIT mystery hunt. A
Speaker 4: lot of these people that come from Cambridge end up
Speaker 4: in New York, end up doing finance related jobs, and
Speaker 4: so they've crafted a taste for this type of thing
Speaker 4: already earlier in life.
Speaker 2: Does every do the mystery hunting?
Speaker 4: I don't think everyone does it, and a lot of
Speaker 4: people who do it are also not currently at MIT.
Speaker 2: I've been invited on team. Is that it seemed like
Speaker 2: more trouble than I was worth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's like a three day event
Speaker 4: or a four day event.
Speaker 2: And one hundred people and you can do it rightly.
Speaker 2: It just seems like a lot.
Speaker 4: It is a lot. You're not wrong.
Speaker 1: About our COO. Teresa participated this last year and had
Speaker 1: a fantastic time and we're going to try to go
Speaker 1: next year. And she went there on a team, and
Speaker 1: it's like, how fun can like being holed up in
Speaker 1: a hotel room solving puzzles, you know, But it really
Speaker 1: seems like the winning teams are it's not just about
Speaker 1: puzzle solving acumen, but about organization of brain power. You know,
Speaker 1: how do you effectively deploy one hundred people to effectively
Speaker 1: manage problems and contribute and make these lateral leaps. And
Speaker 1: it seems like that's the key to the MIT Mystery Hunt,
Speaker 1: which is I think, such an interesting social management problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was reading a Courts article from twenty thirteen.
Speaker 3: I think it was because Midnight Madness went on a
Speaker 3: bit of a hiatus and then it came back right
Speaker 3: And the article is talking about how originally the thinking,
Speaker 3: you know, among the Goldmen Sacks teams who participated, was
Speaker 3: that they wanted to stack their teams with quants. They
Speaker 3: just wanted a lot of big brains. But the team
Speaker 3: that ended up winning was a group that worked together.
Speaker 3: I think they were client facing, and they shocked their
Speaker 3: winning up too, just we know how to work together.
Speaker 3: We don't necessarily have the smartest guy in the room,
Speaker 3: but we all know how to manage together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also like if it's all quants, like you
Speaker 2: want different kinds of intelligence too, like in solving the
Speaker 2: puzzles as well as in creating the puzzle, like you know,
Speaker 2: as I was thinking about like why the financial industry
Speaker 2: likes puzzle hunts, I mean I was thinking, like teamwork
Speaker 2: is always pretty heavily emphasized. He like interviewed a financial firm,
Speaker 2: and like the idea of like getting different types of
Speaker 2: intelligence together and trying to delegate responsibility and brandstorm together
Speaker 2: does seem like useful in the job. And then it
Speaker 2: hadn't even occurred to me that, like thee hundred person
Speaker 2: MIT mystery hunt teams are an enormous management problem. But yes,
Speaker 2: like if you can manage a puzzle hunt team of
Speaker 2: one hundred people, that does seem useful for managing a
Speaker 2: hedge fund.
Speaker 1: They create custom software platforms just to manage the puzzles.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. I did want to go back to you
Speaker 1: were correcting that at midnight men is we're out of
Speaker 1: Goldman And I'd say maybe still less than I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe forty percent of our teams are Goldman thirty to
Speaker 1: forty percent of our teams, so they're a huge supporter.
Speaker 1: And just to give the context for your listeners, this
Speaker 1: Midnight Madness is a charity event for Good Shepherd Services.
Speaker 1: And so the great part is instead of going to
Speaker 1: a fundraiser where you have to you know, buy a
Speaker 1: table and sit through speeches and watch pretty picture videos,
Speaker 1: you stake a team to compete. And so I'd say, yeah,
Speaker 1: still definitely a huge The biggest showing is from Goldman,
Speaker 1: but there's probably fifteen to twenty different firms represented, everything
Speaker 1: from bigger investment banks to quant firms to really small
Speaker 1: shops and I don't even know all the different types
Speaker 1: of shops that are represented there. And it goes from
Speaker 1: like places where the CEO is leading the team and
Speaker 1: to places where the CEO stakes the team and then
Speaker 1: like puts his best people on the team and shows
Speaker 1: up at the finish line, or also places where just
Speaker 1: like they just look at it as a donation and
Speaker 1: let the people who want to show up.
Speaker 2: But right, the idea is like basically Midnight Madness, as
Speaker 2: the funders are for Good Shepherd. A team is up
Speaker 2: to six people, correct, and it costs something like forty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars to sponsor a team, So it's exactly it's
Speaker 2: a meaningful donation.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And so we'll have twenty five teams duking
Speaker 1: it out on October fourth, the early hours of October fifth,
Speaker 1: duking it out for the title of the most you know,
Speaker 1: most intelligent and really best.
Speaker 2: So in my experience, the production values for Midnight Madness
Speaker 2: are really high. Like the year I did it most recently,
Speaker 2: it ended on the intrepid, like the aircraft car and
Speaker 2: solving a puzzle on and a real Enigma machine. I
Speaker 2: don't know if you know this, but it's very finance
Speaker 2: industry coded, like you're not a hedge fund unless you
Speaker 2: have a real Enigma machine somewhere. And it was like,
Speaker 2: you know, you have to like get clues, like going
Speaker 2: to like a screening of a movie on a rooftop
Speaker 2: in Brooklyn, and like there was a like chessboard in
Speaker 2: the Brooklyn Museum. It was like a real pretty high
Speaker 2: end experience. I'm very interested in talking about the puzzle aspect,
Speaker 2: but like as designers, I feel like you're more interested
Speaker 2: in like the cool experiences side of it. You're talking
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that was really intimidating. And it's interesting
Speaker 4: when Ryan and I started designing games like this when
Speaker 4: we were in college, just for our friends and scraping
Speaker 4: together a couple of bucks from our own pocket and
Speaker 4: trying to dream as big as we could. And only
Speaker 4: many years later we came across an article about the
Speaker 4: tradition of mid Night Madness and learned that there was
Speaker 4: a puzzle that year where teams had controls that were
Speaker 4: actively controlling the lights on the Empire state building and
Speaker 4: changing the colors to solve a puzzle. And we were
Speaker 4: absolutely floored by the kind of production value available to
Speaker 4: these game designers and thought like, wow, if we could
Speaker 4: just do something like that one day, that would be
Speaker 4: the biggest dream that we could dream for ourselves. And yeah,
Speaker 4: so a lot of the fee that people contribute to
Speaker 4: stake a team does go towards the production of a
Speaker 4: very fantastic and epic game, and that's part of the appeal.
Speaker 4: It is interesting for us to try to design for
Speaker 4: the man or woman who has everything quote unquote, and
Speaker 4: if you're super wealthy and you have all these kind
Speaker 4: of opportunities and experiences available to you on a regular basis.
Speaker 4: You know what is impressive, what can make an impression
Speaker 4: on that type of person. And I think that's part
Speaker 4: of where this tradition has come from, of like, wow,
Speaker 4: it has to be bombastic, and having access to landmark
Speaker 4: locations in New York City that you wouldn't normally have
Speaker 4: is a big part of it. The scale has changed
Speaker 4: a bit. I think when Alicia was designing it, maybe
Speaker 4: a much bigger portion of the fee went towards the
Speaker 4: production value of the game and reallocating a different kind
Speaker 4: of percentage to the charity versus.
Speaker 1: The more to the charity. To be clear, now we
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 2: Do you have a list of like here are some
Speaker 2: cool locations, let's see if you can get them, and
Speaker 2: then like often get told no or.
Speaker 1: Like absolutely if you want to like get.
Speaker 2: The Intrepid, like how easy is that? And when you
Speaker 2: call and you say hi, we run a puzzle hunt
Speaker 2: with a lot of golden people like does that work?
Speaker 2: Or people like what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: It's everything. We didn't get the Intrepid. I think that
Speaker 1: was the year before we started working with them, So
Speaker 1: I can't speak to specifically renting the Intrepid, but it's
Speaker 1: always yeah at midnight, yeah, or into two am. Some
Speaker 1: things are wow, we're never going to get that, And
Speaker 1: then people come back to us and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: about twenty five hundred dollars and you're like, great, let's
Speaker 1: do it.
Speaker 2: What's like the most surprising location thing you've gotten access to?
Speaker 1: Last game?
Speaker 4: We did a puzzle in Fao Schwartz where teams had
Speaker 4: to play the big piano with their feet to solve
Speaker 4: a puzzle that was a really fun one for someone
Speaker 4: who grew up watching the movie Big with Tom Hanks.
Speaker 3: We could also ask the inverse of that question, I mean,
Speaker 3: where have you been turned down from that you really
Speaker 3: wanted to happen?
Speaker 1: You know, every year there's a theme. In twenty twenty
Speaker 1: three it was the Lost Cosmonauts, which is a riff
Speaker 1: on a conspiracy theory that there's cosmonauts that were launched
Speaker 1: into space that we'd never heard about, and kind of
Speaker 1: the seat of the idea is that somehow they're still
Speaker 1: alive and we have to bring them home, and so
Speaker 1: we're going to do a cosmonaut training course, like in
Speaker 1: a swimming pool in New York, City, and so I
Speaker 1: was trying to get one of those huge inflatable like
Speaker 1: water obstacle courses. You know, We're going to like order
Speaker 1: this ten thousand dollars inflatable obstacle course from China and
Speaker 1: then like set it up in an Olympic sized pool
Speaker 1: in New York City and it just did not fly.
Speaker 1: And you know, we had a poor good shepherd staffer
Speaker 1: who was in charge of trying to find me my
Speaker 1: swimming pool, and she was just like, Ryan, I don't
Speaker 1: think anyone's gonna let us inflate this giant obstacle course
Speaker 1: in the pool.
Speaker 4: I've always wanted to do a puzzle in the Natural
Speaker 4: History Museum, like with the Big Whale.
Speaker 3: And Night at the Museum style.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. You have to become like an official partner
Speaker 4: of the museum and it's like an annual membership that
Speaker 4: costs thirty thousand dollars, and then there's all these other
Speaker 4: hoops you have to jump through and.
Speaker 3: You can get a Bloomberg terminal with that.
Speaker 1: Some of the best locations we've had are like the
Speaker 1: rooftop of the Port Authority Bus terminal on the north
Speaker 1: end of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, there's an uncovered
Speaker 1: parking deck that anyone can access, and you can look
Speaker 1: down forty first Street all the way to the library,
Speaker 1: through Times Square, through Bryant Bryant Park, and at night
Speaker 1: it's one of the most incredible places in New York City,
Speaker 1: and it's just sitting there for anyone to come and see.
Speaker 1: Or we'll like park a box truck on the side
Speaker 1: of the street and have people go in and there's
Speaker 1: like a speakeasy type establishment with like a live band
Speaker 1: inside a box truck delivery truck just parked on the
Speaker 1: side of the road. And so the venues that we
Speaker 1: love are those types of unexpected delight that kind of
Speaker 1: like are hidden in that New York City is so
Speaker 1: good at kind of concealing.
Speaker 2: What about like best puzzles, right, so you've talked about
Speaker 2: like the simplest level is like you get handed a
Speaker 2: piece of paper and you do some piece of paper
Speaker 2: like certainly like i'd been diet madness with production value
Speaker 2: is what they are. Like there's some amount of like
Speaker 2: doing puzzles on cool physical objects. Like what are some
Speaker 2: like cool physical objects that have been purposed as puzzles.
Speaker 1: I have one sitting right here it's a like a
Speaker 1: palaneer orb crystal ball that we distributed the crystal ball. Yeah,
Speaker 1: holding up a crystal ball and it reacts with different
Speaker 1: colors and flashing patterns based on where you are geographically.
Speaker 1: And so there was a whole puzzle in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: one scattered all over Central Park, and as you approach
Speaker 1: different locations, the globe did different things and flashed different
Speaker 1: color sequences, and then those were decoded. One of my
Speaker 1: favorite puzzles from I think this is an atlasio. I
Speaker 1: don't know, but I've read about it in one of
Speaker 1: the many articles that I'm sure you guys said, was
Speaker 1: the circuit board where you had to assemble circle circuit
Speaker 1: board and then one of the transistors overheated and you
Speaker 1: discovered that the circuit board was actually a map of
Speaker 1: New York City subway stations, and when you looked at
Speaker 1: it through an infrared camera, you know it was identifying
Speaker 1: which station to go to. So that's another example of
Speaker 1: something that lives in my head as a great use
Speaker 1: of a physical object.
Speaker 3: Just to go back to midnight madness really quickly, I mean,
Speaker 3: so you have these three to four to five hour puzzles,
Speaker 3: I believe you said Midnight Maddness seems like a different
Speaker 3: beast entirely in that you know it runs overnight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, what is your time expectation for this year's
Speaker 2: Midnight Madness?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: When does it start? And when do you expect the
Speaker 2: last team to finish? Yeah?
Speaker 4: About twelves and fourteen hours, depending on how fast teams are.
Speaker 4: The idea is to start it, Yeah, early afternoon one
Speaker 4: or two, and then it ends sometimes shortly after midnight,
Speaker 4: hopefully not too much longer than that.
Speaker 3: So it's in early October. When do you start planning
Speaker 3: for it?
Speaker 4: Typically about a year in advance, so it's about a
Speaker 4: year in the making.
Speaker 2: Do you design games for like a lot of big
Speaker 2: Wall Street for can you, like, say, or your repeat
Speaker 2: clients or something.
Speaker 4: Yes, we have a lot of Wall Street clients. That's
Speaker 4: our biggest audience and our biggest client base.
Speaker 5: We have liked in your business, you do like relatively
Speaker 5: short like one day events for like team building events
Speaker 5: for companies who hire you to design games.
Speaker 1: Yeah, three to four hours long, based on how much
Speaker 1: we think that they can take or how much we
Speaker 1: know that they can take. As we have repeat clients,
Speaker 1: we start to understand the culture of the company and
Speaker 1: what they're looking for and what they can handle, and yeah,
Speaker 1: there's been.
Speaker 2: Something you can handle the most.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, there's a difference between who can handle
Speaker 1: the most and who wants to give off the vibe
Speaker 1: like they can.
Speaker 2: Hold of the most.
Speaker 1: Right, Yea, we have NDA. All of these companies.
Speaker 2: Are so secret we'll beleeve them out.
Speaker 1: It's really hard. Fortunately, Bridgewater has been very generous that
Speaker 1: they allow us to talk to say that we have
Speaker 1: done many hunts for them, and they actually came to
Speaker 1: us only recently in twenty twenty one after they did
Speaker 1: Midnight Manas formerly known as Compass with us, and we've
Speaker 1: worked with them multiple times a year for different teams,
Speaker 1: and they're awesome to work with.
Speaker 2: I do want to know where bridge Will falls on
Speaker 2: the can handle things and want to give the impression,
Speaker 2: but it seems rude to make you.
Speaker 1: Answer they're great. I mean, don't make us pick between
Speaker 1: our children. We love all of our puzzle shouldern equally.
Speaker 1: And the only thing I'll say is specifically the team
Speaker 1: we work for does love the puzzly puzzles. You know,
Speaker 1: there's definitely a gradient of people that love the experience.
Speaker 1: They love the locations and the feedback we get from
Speaker 1: from Bridgewater at least the point of contact and our
Speaker 1: who helps us plan their events, is that they want
Speaker 1: the puzzles, they want the goods.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they want the brutality. They like it to be difficult.
Speaker 1: And it's been really interesting for us as again outsiders,
Speaker 1: like we both went to art school, figuring out what's
Speaker 1: the difference between like a quant Hedge Front and a
Speaker 1: Bridgewater and a Goldman and where they all function in
Speaker 1: this world. It's been quite the education.
Speaker 4: They each have a different culture that manifests differently in
Speaker 4: our games, and often the culture is kind of inspired
Speaker 4: by the founder. Like some of them are work hard,
Speaker 4: play hard, and they they like to party hard, and
Speaker 4: that's a culture that emanates from the founder. And some
Speaker 4: of them are more like about work life balance and generosity,
Speaker 4: and they each kind of have a very distinct culture
Speaker 4: that we can recognize just in our limited touch points
Speaker 4: through our games. And also when a lot of our
Speaker 4: client base was more tech like Google and Meta and
Speaker 4: tech firms, we joke about like making our own private
Speaker 4: investments based on how well we see people doing in
Speaker 4: our games, because we definitely recognize the companies that are
Speaker 4: doing well for us, we're also doing well in the market.
Speaker 1: And then when those same companies three years later stopped
Speaker 1: doing well, it meant something.
Speaker 2: Stop doing around the puzzles. The puzzles were like a
Speaker 2: leading indicator of the stock or exactly. Yeah, as a
Speaker 2: hedge found ever been like you're gonnat puzzles come work.
Speaker 1: For us, not in house, but we know some hedge
Speaker 1: funds that do have in house puzzle creators and have
Speaker 1: hired our friends as in house puzzle creators. So it exists.
Speaker 1: It's a thing.
Speaker 2: I've seen some of that, right because like clearly like
Speaker 2: there is a big like recruiting dynamic of a lot
Speaker 2: of these firms like to hire people who are good
Speaker 2: at puzzles. They like to pose puzzles to them as
Speaker 2: part of the recruiting process. They like to attract people
Speaker 2: who like puzzles. So that seem like an overlap in
Speaker 2: the puzzle creator community. Like, is there like a trend
Speaker 2: where a lot of people have a certain degree or
Speaker 2: a certain background.
Speaker 1: Certainly, yeah, stats, math business, definitely, But then there's also
Speaker 1: people who do a lot of more linguistic puzzles. There's
Speaker 1: like a whole kind of like the crossword, you know
Speaker 1: that whole world is a little more linguistic and they
Speaker 1: have a different background.
Speaker 2: What I've done puzzles, there's always a like cryptic crossword
Speaker 2: cluing type puzzle, and I'm always the guy who solves this.
Speaker 2: Like that's why one contribution to the team.
Speaker 1: Right right, A good puzzle creation team has a good
Speaker 1: puzzle is created by people with a lot of different backgrounds.
Speaker 2: I assume that when you do team building events, it's
Speaker 2: like a company like two hundred people. But do you
Speaker 2: ever have like these five people are going to do
Speaker 2: a puzzle on together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean yeah, yeah, if you can afford us,
Speaker 1: we'll do it. And we've done groups as small as
Speaker 1: four and groups as large as what three hundred four hundred?
Speaker 2: John, Well, can you tell me about the groups of four? Like,
Speaker 2: how does that come in?
Speaker 1: Either someone's birthday, it's a birthday party. Usually you know
Speaker 1: someone who really likes puzzles, and either they can afford
Speaker 1: our our services because we just like run a past
Speaker 1: event for them, or they have a ton of money
Speaker 1: and we do something completely tailored to them that's like
Speaker 1: all about their life and all about their fifty years
Speaker 1: and all about their kids and and those are really
Speaker 1: fun too.
Speaker 4: We've done many birthdays for CEOs of like hedge funds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say, like, this feels like a
Speaker 2: classic hedgehund manager fiftieth birthday party.
Speaker 1: We did one hedge fund who said that they wanted
Speaker 1: maybe if you want to talk about our White Whale
Speaker 1: was the one of the co CEOs. This is a small,
Speaker 1: small fund and they said, Okay, I'm gonna I want
Speaker 1: to do this across Europe for my fiftieth birthday. And
Speaker 1: I was like, yes, let's do it. Call us and
Speaker 1: then they never showed.
Speaker 2: But you have like preliminary budget.
Speaker 1: No, no, we didn't. We didn't even get yeah, get
Speaker 1: that far. But it was it was a really fun
Speaker 1: It was for a fun that was celebrating their twenty
Speaker 1: fifth anniversary I think in London, and so we got
Speaker 1: to build a six hour hunt in London and that
Speaker 1: was one of our favorite still our favorite jobs to date.
Speaker 1: But it could have been the lead into a cross
Speaker 1: Europe scavenger hunt, but wasn't to be.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well you said something about like you had a
Speaker 2: lot of tech clients and now you have fewer tech
Speaker 2: clients and it's like more finance geuing, Like, what do
Speaker 2: you think is causing that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've definitely seen the shift from when tech was
Speaker 1: the coolest place to be and now it's these companies
Speaker 1: have matured and they're still great places to work, but
Speaker 1: there's a little less of an edge to them. I
Speaker 1: think we've seen they're also working a little less hard
Speaker 1: at employer retention and they're pulling back the perks. And
Speaker 1: so we've seen pre pandemic specifically, we do a lot
Speaker 1: of like fifty to eighty percent events for big tech companies,
Speaker 1: growing tech companies, that sort of thing, and then post pandemic,
Speaker 1: we've seen a lot fewer tech companies. And when the
Speaker 1: tech companies do come, this is more of a return
Speaker 1: to office thing, but it's a much smaller group. So
Speaker 1: people are getting together in much smaller groups. They're going
Speaker 1: out with their immediate five to twelve team members and
Speaker 1: not their full division or whatever. And so we at
Speaker 1: the same time, we've seen a lot more hedge funds
Speaker 1: and AI companies coming in, and so, yeah, as the
Speaker 1: type of company where young, ambitious, really smart people work
Speaker 1: at kind of shifts, we do see that our in
Speaker 1: our clients.
Speaker 2: As well, so it's like if you work at Facebook,
Speaker 2: like ten years ago you were like I really want
Speaker 2: to solve puzzles, Like I'm motivated to like use my brain.
Speaker 2: And now it's like I'm going to rest invest and
Speaker 2: like going a puzzle hunt.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say exactly, but yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: a little bit of the vibe I get. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons that I started reading money stuff was after
Speaker 1: you wrote that huge Crypto article, Matt, And at the
Speaker 1: same time, we were building a completely bespoke, kind of
Speaker 1: alternate reality game puzzle community for a NFT firm, and
Speaker 1: we had no idea what we were doing in Crypto,
Speaker 1: no idea what we're doing with NFTs, and so reading
Speaker 1: your article helped me like get my head around this
Speaker 1: whole concept. As we were building out this game community
Speaker 1: world ip universe that we were hired to do kind
Speaker 1: of like as an extension of the bord A Biacht
Speaker 1: Club universe, and and it was a we did get paid, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we got paid. It was it was an incredible, incredible
Speaker 1: experience and we got to create characters and create stories
Speaker 1: and sometimes our events are a little more puzzle puzzly
Speaker 1: oriented and this was the most built out we've ever
Speaker 1: like created a whole world, Like we created locations and
Speaker 1: characters and plot points and betrayals and you know, stashed
Speaker 1: puzzles in lockers at the Lax airport and in bars
Speaker 1: in London and slipped burner phones and it was a
Speaker 1: really fun event. Now, the prodect as a whole didn't
Speaker 1: survive more than a few years, but we kind of
Speaker 1: were in this at one of the crypto bull markets
Speaker 1: and it's a real moment in time.
Speaker 2: We've talked about hedgphones and tech firms, like we didn't
Speaker 2: even talk about like what does the chart of like
Speaker 2: your crypto expressure. Yes, I never heard from them.
Speaker 1: It's that's pretty much it. Yeah, we haven't done any
Speaker 1: of our private kind of team building events for crypto firms.
Speaker 1: This was a kind of like a public facing event
Speaker 1: for the crypto community, and it was led by a
Speaker 1: guy who wanted to create this series of ip around
Speaker 1: some of the board apes, or to be more specific,
Speaker 1: the mutant apes, which is a whole subgenre of apes.
Speaker 5: I think we'll end it there, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: John and Ryan, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2: This is fun.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1: It's great to be here. Hope to see you on
Speaker 1: the streets.
Speaker 3: Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1: Thanks honored to be your section guests. Yeah wow, what
Speaker 1: a distinction.
Speaker 2: And that was The Money Stuff Podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Matt Luvian and I'm Katie Greifeld.
Speaker 2: You can find my work by subscribing to The Money
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Speaker 3: Dot com, and you can find me on Bloomberg TV
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Speaker 2: The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Ana ma Asarakus
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Speaker 3: Theme music was composed by Blake Maples.
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