Midnight Madness: Ryan Patch and Jon Seale

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Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Podcasts, Radio, News.

I feel like it's going to be weird to do an intro, but like

it's the Money Stuff Podcast.

We're here today with, I think, our second episode with a guest.

Yes.

Two guests.

Our second and third guests.

Second and third guests.

They are Ryan Patch and John Seal of the Great Gotham Challenge, two creators of puzzle hunts.

Welcome.

That's about all you need to say.

We make puzzle hunts.

We got in touch because I am a degenerate puzzle hunter in my way.

And

Ryan and John are taking over, or sort of have taken over,

the big financial industry puzzle hunt that I have done occasionally, which is sometimes called Compass, but is mostly called Midnight Madness and runs overnight this year in October.

So welcome, John and Ryan.

Thank you.

Happy to be here.

Coming soon to New York City Street near you.

This is a podcast broadly about money, stuff related to money.

That's what we bill it as.

It's not always true, but that's kind of what we say.

And it has a listenership that includes a lot of financial industry and tech industry people.

And the overlap of that audience with people who do puzzle hunts is meaningful, but it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

And so I kind of want to explain what a puzzle hunt is.

And I feel like you guys might say that you're something other than puzzle hunt guys exactly, but I really want to explain what puzzles are.

So can I prompt you with that?

I think sometime in the 90s, maybe before

the

MIT mystery hunt started, I get the sense that that is the beginning of the industry that we are weirdly a part of, largely by accident, I would say, because when Ryan and I decided to start designing puzzle hunts, we weren't aware of any of the existing ones.

We thought we were making something that no one had ever heard of before.

A puzzle hunt, in definition, doesn't have to be location-based, but in our case and in many cases, it's a location-based hunt in which people travel from place to place, solve a complex puzzle, and by puzzle I don't mean jigsaw puzzle, but they receive a series of clues and pieces of information that have to be combined in some way and thought of laterally in order to yield a solution.

And that solution will often take them to a new place and they'll kind of repeat that process.

Maybe people are familiar with The Amazing Race.

It's combining elements of something like The Amazing Race with elements of an escape room

and all

into a competition in which people are competing against each other most of the time in small teams to prove their mettle and arrive at the end first or with the highest standing that they can.

I became aware of puzzle hunts before I became aware of escape rooms.

And I don't know if that's like the actual chronology in the world where like people investigate.

That's not my experience.

Yeah.

Well, puzzle hunts are pretty niche.

Escape rooms came after puzzle hunts.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

They sort of grew out of the puzzle hunt idea and like you could put an escape room in a place and sell it to people every day rather than do it once a year.

And the escape rooms are definitely a little more consumer oriented, whereas a puzzle hunt, you have to be a certain glutton for punishment or at least intellectual stimuli.

Escape rooms are great because you know at the end of 60 minutes you're done.

Whereas a puzzle hunt, if you fail, you're floundering in the middle of some urban landscape trying to figure out where to go next.

At 3 a.m., often.

But you know what I would say is that I think escape rooms and puzzle hunts share an origin story, I would guess, which is that it's people saying, what if we could be in a video game in real life?

So it's kind of taking this idea of a quest and something to be solved and creating a real life experience around that.

Right.

Yeah.

What differentiates a puzzle hunt from a scavenger hunt, or is that just a meaningless distinction?

Is it the puzzles?

Absolutely.

You get clues and you have to think critically in scavenger hunts.

There's definitely a blurry line between the two, but I think that the puzzle hunts are often, once you arrive at a location, you're not just there to find something, you're there to solve a complex situation.

And there's pen and paper puzzle hunts where you just like go to a location and you're given a few pieces of paper, and they're all kind of these very crosswordy or language-based or math-based puzzles that you wind up solving, and then they result to a keyword, or often the next location that you're going to.

And then you go to the next location, you get handed another set of papers.

So there's always some very specific activity.

Now, we came kind of this from more of the immersion angle.

We kind of asked ourselves the question, what would it look like if people felt like they were in a movie?

And then we started creating these quests.

And then we realized, well, to kind of unlock the door that kind of lets you into the next thing, there needs to be a puzzle.

And so we kind of came at it from a little more of an angle saying, well, we need to have a key for that door.

We need to have a password for that door and started slowly integrating puzzles.

So we kind of backed into the puzzle hunt community from more of like an immersive angle, whereas the puzzle hunt community has then kind of been pulled a little more into the immersive community through escape rooms, through immersive theater.

And then you have, yeah, the scavenger hunt community, which is kind of geocaching adjacent and just making hunts for your 10-year-old kids adjacent.

And

the worst version of a scavenger hunt is like, take pictures of five out-of-state license plates or like, you know, get a photo of a person with a beard and is kind of our guiding light that we move away from.

We draw a distinction in our world between puzzles and tasks.

And a puzzle is, it requires some sort of lateral thinking, and a task is just an action that you complete.

So I think a lot of scavenger hunts are task-based versus a puzzle requires you to use your brain in a different way.

Do you have like a classic puzzle or like a form of puzzle or a way to describe more concretely what the puzzles and puzzle hunts are?

Because like to me, and I have not, I don't think, done your challenges, although I think I did a Midnight Meta or Compass that might have been partly your doing.

And I have a sense, like an inarticulate sense of what puzzle hunt puzzles feel like.

You know, I've done, I don't know, four or five puzzle hunts on an escape room or two.

But like, how do you think about puzzles and like what is a puzzle and like what kinds of things are puzzles?

Could you give a puzzle that we could talk about on a podcast?

Sure.

I think every puzzle hunt has its own tradition of how it defines a puzzle.

And Ryan and I are the first people to be in charge of the midnight madness tradition, kind of coming from the outside, not having played and not being from the finance industry.

So we had to do our homework and spend a lot of time learning what's a puzzle by the definition of midnight madness.

And one thing that we identified is each one should involve a logical leap.

So there's typically a mental connection that you make between two different types of information.

So an example of a puzzle that I think is a good illustration of this from an event that we did a few years ago was designed by our friend Josh Davener.

And it's a puzzle in which you receive a wrap sheet that looks like a police description of several perpetrators of criminals and each one has a description and then a picture of what looks like a fingerprint for each one.

But you use clues in the descriptions and you use clues of what the visual of the fingerprint looks like to actually make a connection that you're not looking at fingerprints, you're looking at topographical maps of mountains.

And each one you discover as you kind of read through the text and look for words that might seem out of place and kind of evidence that the descriptions are not quite fitting well to like how a policeman might describe a criminal to recognize that each of the seven is representing the seven highest peaks on each continent.

And so so then you use that information to go back to the first descriptions and in there you work with the information you have to yield a final solution, which is a key word.

But in order to do that, you have to be able to make this mental leap and recognize that one thing is actually representing another.

How do you make them difficult without being infuriating?

Because this is something different, but Bloomberg has a weekly quiz, QuizGo.

Matt, you've played it.

I have.

You've written it, right?

I used to be the curator of the quiz, and one of the metrics on which I judged myself was by how many people who started the quiz completed the quiz.

And there was like this fine balance I had to find between making it challenging, but not making it annoying.

So how do you find that balance when you're putting together puzzles and make sure that people basically don't rage quit?

Yes, you're our sister in pain.

I see.

I think that's the number one skill of a good puzzle creator.

I think that right there is the magic sauce: figuring out something that's just hard enough that makes people really feel like they've gone on a journey and they were just about to quit, but then they had that spark of inspiration that turned it all around for them and then everything fell into place.

And then looking back on it, it's like, oh, of course that was the answer.

It could never have not been the answer.

And bringing people on that journey and allowing them to go on that journey themselves.

And then by the end of it, having that, I heard it recently described as I think secondhand fun or second degree fun, where it's like, it sucked in the moment, but when you look back on it, it's a pleasureful thing.

And so creating that moment, it's very difficult.

And we've struggled with it.

And, you know, we created the Great Gotham Challenge.

I created the first one by myself.

John was a participant.

This is how we started working together.

And no one finished it.

Everyone rage quit.

It was in 2009.

The stock market had crashed.

I just graduated college and couldn't get a job.

And so.

Me and another friend created this and it was supposed to be like a four-hour thing.

Everyone just texted us after hour four and was like, I am a quarter of the way through.

Please put a bullet in my head.

And so it's just like, okay, come to the finish line.

But anyways, we've gotten better.

We've been doing this for about 11 years and a lot of it is playtesting.

Like we have a community of people that just playtest our puzzles and they time themselves and we make sure we know how long a puzzle should take and what the right deviation is.

And it's also a lot of argument.

Like we've just got people that we really trust and who have done a lot of these things.

And someone says, this is way too hard.

This is way too easy.

And we just go 12 rounds until we find something that we all agree on and we we trust each other so part of it's not working in a vacuum and part of it's just a lot of experience and part of it's playtesting john and i are creative by nature and we brought in an operations person to help run our company named teresa who's brilliant and has saved our company many times but one of the things she instigated is no we we playtest things we playtest things thoroughly i think another part of the answer to kitty's question is is when i've done puzzle hunts there's there's some sort of like hint mechanism where you can like, without fully giving up, you can give up a little and get some sort of help.

Can you talk about how you think about that?

Yeah, and it's interesting because we've seen this done different ways.

And in the Midnight Madness puzzle hunt that we stage every other year for the finance industry, there's kind of a bespoke, personalized, what's called game controller who meters out hints.

It's like your personal tormentor.

Right, right, exactly.

And this is actually something very unique about the Wall Street vibe is that the game controllers are known to be a little malicious and a little kind of, because we've been kind of apprenticing with the current creators for the last four years and we've taken it over this year.

And so we've watched them and tried to learn and we've been like, this seems weird.

This seems mean.

And they're like, oh no, it's what people want.

Like, it's what the players want.

That's done in a very like bespoke, handcrafted concierge way, both the hinting and the tormenting.

Whereas like on our Great Gotham Challenge branded puzzle hunts that we do, there's kind of a unified pre-canned hint system that, you know, when you feel like you're at a dead end, you can take a hint and there's a certain time penalty.

And we've introduced a fun gamified mechanic where the longer you're on a puzzle, the less penalty time you get.

And so, yeah, there absolutely needs to be a hint system.

And that's absolutely a way that you keep people within the same universe.

If there was no hint system, then you'd see deviations of 200% on times.

My experience of like compass or midnight madness is like, if you're like getting on the subway to go to the wrong burrow, your game control will be like, hold on.

Right.

Yeah.

There's some amount of like, don't do something really stupid.

And that's the, yeah, that's, that's the designer's job is to, yeah, figuring out how to let people fail enough that they go through those peaks and valleys of emotions, but not letting them fail so much that they're just destroyed.

Yeah, you want to feel like you can fail so that when you succeed, you feel good about it.

Right.

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Can we talk about Midnight Madness?

I've written about having done one or two compass on switch.

My understanding is that like at some point

a kind of Goldman Sachs affiliated group of Wall Street people started a Midnight Madness puzzle hunt, possibly named after a movie of the same name.

And it was called Midnight Madness because it started at, I don't know, 4 p.m.

and went until 2 p.m.

the next day.

Everything you've heard is correct, yes.

Yeah.

And it was run by, I think, Alicia Wiesel at Goldman.

And then it became so overwhelming that my understanding it was like the winners got to run it the next time.

And I know like Colin Teichel ran it for a while.

And that is like, in my understanding, the premier like Wall Street puzzle hunt.

And all of the teams are like eight Goldman teams and six Chain Street teams.

Is that basically correct?

Most of that's correct.

Alicia designed it for, I think, maybe a decade or a little less.

And at some point, I think he decided it was too much for him to continue and just decided, I can't keep doing this.

I need to quit.

And the team that won the year that he called his final year decided that they loved the game too much to let it die.

So they said, we'll take over.

We'll put it under a different name so that people recognize that it's under new management.

They ran it for several years and then they decided we can't keep doing this.

It's destroying our lives and our relationships.

Because all of these people have like real jobs in the financial industry and also extracurricularly design these insane all-night puzzle hunts.

As opposed to us who have fake jobs in the financial industry.

Yes, that's correct.

No, we have real jobs in puzzle hunts.

Yeah, exactly.

So this is your job.

It's not their job.

It's a little more sustainable for us, but yes, exactly.

Like, I don't know how they could possibly do it because this is my full-time job.

It already is so hard for me.

I can't imagine working at a hedge fund while simultaneously doing this.

So you guys are professional puzzle hunt makers and they are professional hedge fund managers.

As you look at their work, what do you think?

Like, were they good at it?

If you have like the regular puzzle hunt community, and then you have like the hedge fund guys, is there a different style or mindset?

Yeah, that's something that Ryan and I were just discussing.

Actually, there are things that are unique to it, there are ways that maybe we look at things a bit differently.

For instance, talking about hints, Ryan and I, as puzzle designers, we kind of believe that a really well-designed puzzle should be able to be completed by a good puzzler without needing to be hinted in any way.

Whereas I think they're coming from a world in which they feel like if it's not hard enough to require someone to take hints, then it's not hard enough.

So that's been an adjustment, I think, for us to kind of recognize.

We're a little more breadcrumb, that leap of logic, in a way that like at the end of a good murder mystery, you look back and you're like, oh, the hints were always there that it was the butler.

And so we're a little more on that end versus, yeah, they're more like, you have to make this leap of logic with no prior breadcrumbs.

I'm with you.

I've had some Midnight Madness experiences where you're like, you get the hint and you're like,

no one would have gotten that.

That makes no sense.

Yeah.

Another big distinction, though, that we've come to terms with, though, that I think is really interesting and says a lot.

And we didn't believe this to be true when we started, but I think we've come around to the idea that the people who are attracted to this Midnight Madness game who come from Wall Street, they do crave, I hesitate to use the word glutton for punishment, but they do crave a certain amount of intensity and some would even say torture that I think was surprising to us.

Yeah, I mean, just the fact that it is sort of runs overnight is

cruel.

In a way, it's like endurance athletics, but with your mind and your body.

Totally.

Yeah.

You have a day job running puzzle hunts under your own brand and like

puzzle hunt activities for corporate clients.

Right.

My sense is that a lot of your clients are also in the financial industry and like puzzle hunting and finance overlap a lot.

Is that right?

Yes, you're onto us.

We didn't mean to do it that way, but the market found us.

Yeah.

What do you think it is about like financial people and puzzle hunts?

Like why do they go together?

Several things.

One is I think the finance industry and the tech industry have become really closely intertwined.

And as I said, the tradition of the MIT mystery hunt, a lot of these people that come from Cambridge end up in New York, end up doing finance-related jobs.

And so they've crafted a taste for this type of thing already earlier in life.

Does everyone at MIT do the mystery hunt?

I don't think everyone does it.

And a lot of people who do it are also not currently at MIT.

I've been invited on Teams that it seemed like more trouble than I was worth.

Yeah, I mean, that's like a three-day event or a four-day event.

And it's a lot of fun.

It's like 100 people and you can do it remotely.

It just seems like a lot.

It is a lot.

You're not wrong about that.

Our COO, Teresa, participated this last year and had a fantastic time.

And

we're going to try to go next year.

And she went there on a team.

And it's like, how fun can like being holed up in a hotel room solving puzzles, you know?

But it really seems like the winning teams are, it's not just about puzzle solving acumen, but about organization of brainpower.

You know, how do you effectively deploy 100 people to effectively manage problems and contribute and make these lateral leaps?

And it seems like that's the key to the MIT mystery hunt, which is, I think, such an interesting social management problem.

Yeah, I was reading a quartz article from 2013, I think it was, because Midnight Madness went on a bit of a hiatus and then it came back.

And the article is talking about how originally the thinking, you know, among the Goldman Sachs teams who participated was that they wanted to stack their teams with quants.

They They just wanted a lot of big brains.

But the team that ended up winning was a group that worked together.

And I think they were client-facing.

And they chalked their winning up to just, we know how to work together.

We don't necessarily have the smartest guy in the room, but we all know how to manage together.

Yeah, and also, like, if it's all quants, like, like, you want different kinds of intelligence too, like, in solving the puzzles as well as in creating the puzzles.

Like, you know, as I was thinking about, like, why the financial industry likes puzzle hunts, I mean, I was thinking, like, teamwork is always pretty heavily emphasized when you like interview at a financial firm.

And like the idea of getting different types of intelligence together and trying to delegate responsibility and brainstorm together does seem like useful in the job.

And then it hadn't even occurred to me that like the 100-person MIT mystery hunt teams are an enormous management problem.

But yes, like if you can manage a puzzle hunt team of 100 people, that does seem useful for managing a hedge fund.

They create custom software platforms just to manage the puzzles.

It's incredible.

I did want to go back to, you were correct in that Midnight Madness grew out of Goldman.

And I'd say maybe still less than, I mean, maybe 40% of our teams are Goldman, 30% to 40% of our teams.

So they're a huge supporter.

And just to give the context for your listeners, this Midnight Madness is a charity event for Good Shepherd Services.

And so the great part is instead of going to a fundraiser where you have to, you know, buy a table and sit through speeches and watch pretty picture videos, you stake a team to compete.

And so I'd say, yeah, still definitely a a huge, the biggest showing is from Goldman, but there's probably 15 to 20 different firms represented, everything from, yeah, bigger investment banks to quant firms to really small shops.

And I don't even know all the different types of shops that are represented there.

And it goes from like places where the CEO is leading the team and to places where the CEO stakes the team and then like puts his best people on the team and shows up at the finish line, or also places where just like they just look at it as a donation and and let the people who want to show up but right the idea is like basically midnight madness is a fundraiser for good shepherd a team is up to six people correct and it costs something like forty thousand dollars to sponsor a team so it's exactly it's a meaningful donation that yeah yeah and so we'll have 25 teams duking it out on october 4th the early hours of october 5th duking it out for the title of the most you know most intelligent and really best

so in my experience the production values for midnight madness are really high like the year I did it most recently, it ended on the Intrepid, like the aircraft carrier, solving a puzzle on a real Enigma machine.

I don't know if you know this, but it's very finance industry coded.

Like you're not a hedge fund unless you have a real Enigma machine somewhere.

And it was like, you know, you had to like get clues by going to like a screening of a movie on a rooftop in Brooklyn.

And like there was a like chessboard in the Brooklyn Museum.

It was like a real, pretty high-end experience.

I'm very interested in like talking about the puzzle aspect, but like as designers, I feel like you're more interested in the cool experiences side of it.

Can you talk about that?

Yeah, that I mean, that was really intimidating.

And it's interesting when Ryan and I started designing games like this when we were in college just for our friends and scraping together a couple of bucks from our own pocket and trying to dream as big as we could.

And only many years later, we came across an article about the tradition of Midnight Madness and learned that there was a puzzle that year where teams had controls that were actively controlling the lights on the Empire State Building and changing the colors to solve a puzzle.

And we were absolutely floored by the kind of production value available to these game designers and thought, like, wow, if we could just do something like that one day, that would be the biggest dream that we could dream for ourselves.

And yeah, so a lot of the fee that people contribute to stake a team does go towards the production of a very fantastic and epic game, and that's part of the appeal.

It is interesting for us to try to design for the man or woman who has everything, quote unquote.

And if you're super wealthy and you have all these kind of opportunities and experiences available to you on a regular basis, you know, what is impressive?

What can make an impression on that type of person?

And I think that's part of where this tradition has come from of like, wow, it has to be bombastic and having access to landmark locations in New York City that you wouldn't normally have is a big part of it.

The scale has changed a bit.

I think when Alicia was designing it, maybe a much bigger portion of the fee went towards the production value of the game.

And we're allocating a different kind of percentage to the charity versus the.

More to the charity, to be clear.

No, we don't know.

Do you have a list of like, here are some cool locations, let's see if we can get them and then like often get told no or like absolutely.

If you want to like get the intrepid, like, how easy is that?

And when you call and you say, hi, we run a puzzle hunt with a lot of golden people.

Like, does that work?

Or people are like, what are you talking about?

It's everything we didn't get the intrepid i think that was the year before we started working with them so i can't speak to specifically renting the intrepid but it's always

yeah at midnight yeah or into 2 a.m some things are wow we're never gonna get that and then people come back to us and like yeah how about twenty five hundred dollars and you're like great let's do it what's the like the most surprising location you or like thing you've gotten access to Last game we did a puzzle in FAO Schwartz where teams had to play the big piano with their feet to solve a puzzle.

That was a really fun one for someone who grew up watching the movie Big with Tom Hanks.

We could also ask the inverse of that question.

I mean, where have you been turned down from that you really wanted to happen?

Well, you know, every year there's a theme.

In 2023, it was the lost cosmonauts, which is a riff on a conspiracy theory that there's cosmonauts that were launched into space that we'd never heard about.

And kind of this seed of the idea is that somehow they're still alive and we have to bring them home.

And so we were going to do a cosmonaut training course like in a swimming pool in New York City.

And so I was trying to get, you know, one of those huge inflatable like water obstacle courses.

You know, we were going to like order this $10,000 inflatable obstacle course from China and then like set it up in an Olympic-sized pool in New York City.

And it just did not fly.

And, you know, we had a poor Good Shepherd staffer who was in charge of trying to find me my swimming pool.

And she was just like, Ryan, I don't think anyone's going to let us inflate this giant obstacle course in the pool.

I've always wanted to do a puzzle in the Natural History Museum, like with the big whale.

Night at the Museum style.

Yeah, exactly.

You have to become like an official partner of the museum, and it's like an annual membership that costs $30,000.

And then there's all these other hoops you have to jump through.

You can get a Bloomberg terminal with that.

Jeez.

Some of the best locations we've had are like...

the rooftop of the Port Authority bus terminal.

On the north end of the Port Authority bus terminal, there's an uncovered parking deck that anyone can access, and you can look down 41st Street all the way to the library, through Times Square, through

Bryant Park.

And at night, it's one of the most incredible places in New York City.

And it's just sitting there for anyone to come and see.

Or we'll like park a box truck on the side of that street and have people go in, and there's like a speakeasy-type establishment with like a live band inside a box truck, a delivery truck just parked on the side of the road.

And so the venues that we love are those types of unexpected delight that kind of like are hidden in that New York City is so good at kind of concealing.

What about like best puzzles, right?

So you've talked about like the simplest level is like you get handed a piece of paper and you do some piece of paper.

Like certainly like at Midnight Madness with production values, what they are, like there are some amount of like doing puzzles on cool physical objects.

Like what are some like cool physical objects that have been purposed as puzzles?

I have one sitting right here.

It's a like a palantir orb crystal ball that we distributed.

Holding up a crystal ball.

Yeah, holding up a crystal ball.

And it reacts with different colors and flashing patterns based on where you are geographically.

And so there was a whole puzzle in 2021 scattered all over Central Park.

And as you approach different locations, the globe did different things and flashed different color sequences.

And then those were decoded.

One of my favorite puzzles from, I think this is an Alicia, I don't know, but I read about it in one of the many articles that I'm sure you guys said: the circuit board, where you had to assemble a circuit board, and then one of the transistors overheated, and you discovered that the circuit board was actually a map of New York City subway stations.

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Just to go back to Midnight Madness really quickly.

I mean, so you have these three to four to five hour puzzles, I believe you said.

Midnight Madness seems like a different beast entirely, in that, you know, it runs overnight.

Yeah, like, what is your time expectation for this year's Midnight Madness?

Like, when does it start, and when do you expect the last team to finish?

Yeah, about 12 to 14 hours, depending on how fast teams are.

The idea is to start it early afternoon, one or two, and then it ends sometime shortly after midnight, hopefully not too much longer than that.

So it's in early October.

When do you start planning for it?

Typically, about a year in advance.

So it's about a year in the making.

Do you design games for like a lot of big Wall Street for you like say your repeat clients or something?

Yes, we have a lot of Wall Street clients.

That's our biggest audience and our biggest client base.

We have like

in your business, you do like relatively short like one-day events for like team building events for companies who hire you to design games, right?

Yeah.

Three to four hours long based on how much we think that they can take or how much we know that they can take.

As we have repeat clients, we start to understand the culture of the company and what they're looking for and what they can handle.

And yeah, there's been some.

Who can handle the most?

Well, you know, there's a difference between who can handle the most and who wants to give off the vibe like they can handle the most.

Right?

Once we're both.

We have NDA.

All of these companies are so secretive.

We'll bleed them out.

It's really hard.

Fortunately, Bridgewater has been very generous that they allow us to talk to say that we have done many hunts for them.

And they actually came to us only recently in 2021 after they did Midnight Madness, formerly known as Compass, with us.

And we've worked with them multiple times a year for different teams.

And they're awesome to work with.

I do want to know where Bridgewater falls on the can handle things and want to give the impression, but it seems rude to make you answer.

They're great.

I mean, don't make us pick between our children.

We love all of our puzzle children equally.

And the only thing I'll say is specifically the team we work for does love the puzzly puzzles.

You know, there's definitely a gradient of people that love the experience, they love the locations, and the feedback we get from Bridgewater, at least the point of contact

who helps us plan their events, is that they want the puzzles, they want the goods.

Yeah, they want the brutality.

They like it to be difficult.

And it's been really interesting for us as, again, outsiders, like we both went to art school figuring out what's the difference between like a quant hedge friend and a Bridgewater and a Goldman and where they all function in this world.

It's been quite the education.

They each have a different culture that manifests differently in our games.

And often the culture is kind of inspired by the founder.

Like some of them are work hard, play hard, and they like to party hard.

And that's a culture that emanates from the founder.

And some of them are more like about work-life balance and generosity.

And they each kind of have a very distinct culture that we can recognize just in our limited touch points through our games.

And also, when a lot of our client base was more tech, like Google and Meta and tech firms, we joke about like making our own private investments based on how well we see people doing in our games because we definitely recognize that companies that are doing well for us were also doing well in the market.

And then when those same companies three years later stopped doing well,

it meant something.

Stopped doing well in the puzzles.

The puzzles were like a leading indicator of the stock?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Has a hedge fund ever been like, you're good at puzzles.

Come work for us.

Not in-house, but we know some hedge funds that do have in-house puzzle creators and have hired our friends as in-house puzzle creators.

So it exists.

It's a thing.

Yeah, I've seen some of that.

Right.

Because like clearly, like

there is a big like

recruiting dynamic of a lot of these firms like to hire people who are good at puzzles.

They like to pose puzzles to them as part of the recruiting process.

They like to attract people who like puzzles.

So it does seem like an overlap.

In the puzzle creator community, is there like a trend where a lot of people have a certain degree or a certain background?

Certainly, yeah.

Stats, math, business, definitely.

But then there's also people who do a lot of more linguistic puzzles.

There's like a whole kind of like the crossword, you know,

that whole world is a little more linguistic and they have a different background.

When I've done puzzle hunts, there's always a like cryptic crossword cluing type puzzle, and I'm always the guy who solves those.

Like, that's my one contribution to the team.

Right, right.

A good puzzle creation team has

a good puzzle is created by people with a lot of different backgrounds.

I assume that when you do team building events, it's like a company for like 200 people, but do you ever have like these five people who are going to do a puzzle hunt together?

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, yeah, if you can afford us, we'll do it.

And we've done groups as small as four and groups as large as, what, 300, 400, John?

Wait, can you tell me about the groups of four?

Like, how does that come in?

Either someone's birth, it's a birthday party, usually.

You know, it's like someone who really likes puzzles.

Someone who really likes puzzles and either they can afford our services because we just like run a past event for them, or they have a ton of money, and we do something completely tailored to them that's like all about their life and all about their 50 years and all about their kids.

And those are really fun, too.

We've done many birthdays for CEOs of like hedge funds.

Yeah, I was going to say, like, this feels like a classic hedge fund manager 50th birthday party.

We did one hedge fund who said that they wanted,

maybe if you want to talk about our white whale, was the one of the co-CEOs of this, is a small fund.

And they said, okay, I'm going to, I want to do this across Europe for my 50th birthday.

And I was like, yes, let's do it.

Call us.

And then they never showed, but

did you have a preliminary budget?

No, no, we didn't.

We didn't even get

that far.

But it was a really fun.

It was for a fund that was celebrating their 25th anniversary, I think, in London.

And so we got to build a six-hour hunt in London.

And that was one of our favorite, still our favorite jobs to date.

But

it could have been the lead-in to a cross-Europe scavenger hunt, but wasn't to be.

Yeah.

You said something about like you had a lot of tech clients and now you have fewer tech clients and it's like more finance skewing.

Like, what do you think is causing that?

Yeah, we've definitely seen the shift from when tech

was

the coolest place to be and now it's these companies have matured and they're still great places to work, but there's a little less of an edge to them.

I think we've seen they're also working a little less hard at employee retention and they're pulling back the perks.

And so we've seen pre-pandemic specifically, we do a lot of like 50 to 80% events for big tech companies, growing tech companies, that sort of thing.

And then post-pandemic, we've seen a lot fewer tech companies.

And when the tech companies do come, this is more of a return-to-office thing, but it's a much smaller group.

So people are getting together in much smaller groups.

They're going out with their immediate five to twelve team members and not their full division or whatever.

And so we, at the same time, we've seen a lot more hedge funds and AI companies coming in.

And so, yeah, as the type of company where young, ambitious, really smart people work at kind of shifts, we do see that in our clients as well.

So it's like if you work at Facebook like 10 years ago, you were like, I really want to solve puzzles.

Like, I'm motivated to

use my brain.

And now it's like, yeah, I'm going to rest, invest, and go on a puzzle hunt.

I don't want to say exactly, but yeah,

that's a little bit of the vibe I get.

One of the reasons that I started reading Money Stuff was after you wrote that huge crypto article, Matt.

And at the same time, we were building a completely bespoke kind of alternate reality game puzzle community for a NFT firm.

And we had no idea what we were doing in crypto, no idea what we were doing with NFTs.

And so, reading your article helped me get my head around this whole concept as we were building out this game community world IP universe that we were hired to do, kind of like as an extension of the Bordeaux Yacht Club universe.

And it was a.

Did you get paid?

We did get paid.

Yeah.

yeah we got paid it was a it was an incredible incredible experience and we got to create characters and create stories and sometimes our events are a little more puzzle puzzly oriented and this was the most built out we've ever like created a whole world like we created locations and characters and plot points and betrayals and you know stashed puzzles in lockers at the LAX airport and in bars in London and slipped burner phones and it was a really fun event Now, the project as a whole didn't survive more than a few years, but we kind of were in this at one of the crypto bull markets.

And

that's a real moment in time.

I know we've talked about hedge funds and tech firms.

We didn't even talk about

what does the chart of your crypto exposure look like?

Yeah.

That's pretty much it.

Yeah.

We haven't done any of our private kind of team building events for crypto firms.

This was a kind of like a public-facing event for the crypto community, and it was led by a guy who wanted to create this series of IP around some of the bored apes, or to be more specific, the mutant apes, which is a whole sub-genre of apes.

And I think we'll end it there.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

John, all right, thank you so much for coming on.

This was fun.

Thank you for having us.

It's great to be here.

Hope to see you on the streets.

Thank you, guys.

Yeah, thanks.

Honored to be your second three guests.

Yeah, wow, what a distinction.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Livian.

And I'm Katie Greifel.

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.com.

And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on Open Interest between 9 to 11 a.m.

Eastern.

We'd love to hear from you.

You can send an email to moneypod at bloomberg.net.

Ask us a question and we might answer it on air.

You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review.

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The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Andam.

Our theme music was composed by Blake Naples.

Brendan Francis Newton is our executive producer.

And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast.

We'll be back next week with more stuff.

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