May 23, 2025 • 40 mins
Katie and Matt talk with Ryan Patch and Jon Seale of Great Gotham Challenge about building puzzle hunts for the hedge fund manager who has everything.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I feel like it's going to be weird to do
an entro, but like it's the Money Stuff podcast. We're
here today with I think our second episode with a guest.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Yes, two guests, Our second and third guests.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Second and third guests. They are Ryan Patch and John
Seal of the Great Gotham Challenge, two creators of puzzle hunts. Welcome.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
That's about all you need to say. We make puzzle hunts.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
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 and Ryan,
(01:00):
thank you.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Coming soon to New York City street near you.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
This is a podcast probably about money stuff related to money.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
That's what we build it as.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
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
(01:34):
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?
Speaker 4 (01:42):
I think sometime in the nineties, maybe before the Mit
mystery un started, I get the sense that that was
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 sinning puzzle hunts, we
weren't aware of any of the existing ones. We thought
(02:03):
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
(02:25):
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,
combining elements of something like the Amazing Race with elements
(02:46):
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 metal and arrive
at the end first or with the highest standing that
they can.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
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 and.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
My experience, Yeah, well, puzzle.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Hunts are pretty niche, but.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
The escape rooms came after puzzle hunts.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, that's why I was like that 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.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
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 stimula. You know,
escape rooms are great because you know, at the end
of sixty 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.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Next at three am. Often.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
What differentiates a puzzle hunt from a scavenger hunt or
is that just a meaningless distinction?
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Is the puzzles absolutely you get.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Clues and you have to think critically, and scavenger hunts.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
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 crossworthy or language
(04:41):
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 in another set
of papers, so there's always some very specific activity. Now,
we came kind of this from more the immersion angle.
We kind of asked ourselves the question to look like
if people felt like they were in a movie, and
(05:03):
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
(05:25):
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 ten year old kids adjacent, and scavenger Hunt the
(05:46):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
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 that I think I did Midnight Matter Compass that
might have been partly your doing. And I have a sense,
like an inarticulate sense of what puzzle hunt puzzles feel
(06:37):
like you know, I've done I don't know, four or
five puzzle hunts and 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 can talk about
on a podcast.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
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
(07:13):
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
(07:36):
Josh Dabner, and it's a puzzle in which you receive
a rap sheet that looks like a police description of
several perpetrators of criminals, and each one has a description
and then 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
(07:58):
looks like to act you 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
(08:20):
might describe a criminal. To recognize that each of the
seven is representing the seven highest peaks on each continent.
And 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,
(08:42):
you have to be able to make this mental leap
and recognize that one thing is actually representing another.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
How do you make them difficult without being infuriating? Because
this is something different. But Bloomberg has a weekly quiz quiz.
Go Matt, you've played it, you've written. I used to
be the cure 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
(09:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Yes, you're our sister in pain, I see.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
I think that's the number one skill of a good
puzzle creator. I think that right there is the magic
sauce is 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
(09:44):
looking back on it, it's like, of course that was
the answer. It could never have not been that 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
it sucked in the moment, but when you look back
on it, it's a pleasureful thing. And so creating that
(10:05):
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 raged quick. It was in two thousand and nine.
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
(10:26):
four hour thing. Everyone just texted us after our four
and it 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 eleven years.
And a lot of it is play testing, Like we
have a community of people. They just play test our
puzzles and they time themselves and we make sure we
know how long a puzzle should take and what the
(10:48):
right deviation is. And it's also a lot of argument,
like we've just got a 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 twelve rounds until we
find something that we all agree on and 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 its playtesting. John and I are creative by nature,
(11:10):
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 play test things. We play test things thoroughly.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
I think another part of the answer to Katie's question
is is when I've done puzzle hunts, 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 like can you talking about how
do you think about that?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
It's like your personal tormentor.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Right right exactly. And this is something very unique about
the Wall Street Vibe is that the game controllers are
known to be a little malicious and a little kount
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
(12:18):
seems mean, and they're like, oh no, it's what people want,
Like it's the 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
(12:39):
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 devations
(13:00):
of two hundred percent on times.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
My experience of like Compass or Midnight Matis 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.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Yeah. You want to feel like you can fail so
that when you succeed, you feel good about it.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Can we talk about Midnight madnas. 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,
(14:10):
and it was called Midnight Madness because it started I
don't know four pm and went until two pm the
next day.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Everything you've heard is correct, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
And it was run by I think Alicia we wasel
at Goldman and then it became so overwhelming that my
understanding was like the winners got to run it the
next time, and I know, like Colin Tykel ran it
for a while, and that is like, in my understanding,
the premiere like Wall Street Puzzle Hunt and all of
the teams are like eight Goldman teams and six Chain
(14:41):
Street teams. Is that basically correct?
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Most of that's correct. Alisha 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
(15:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
All of these people have like real jobs in the
financial industry and also extracurricularly designed these insane all night
puzzle hunts.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
As opposed to us who have fake jobs in the
financial industry. Yes, that's correct. Now we have real jobs
in puzzle hunts.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, exactly, So this is your job, it's not their job.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Is a little more sustainable for us, but yes, 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.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
So you guys are professional puzzle hunt makers and they
are professional headsphund matters. As you look at their work,
what do you think were they good at it? If
you have like the regular puzzle HNK community and then
you have like the headshund guys, is there a different
style or mindset.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
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
of 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,
(16:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
We're a little more bread crumb, 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 red crumb.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
I'm with you. I've had some Midnight Madness experiences where
you're like, you get the hnt in your No one
would have gotten that.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
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 they
(17:30):
do crave a certain amount of intensity and some would
even say torture that I think was surprising to us.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Yeah, I mean, just the fact that it is sort
of runs overnight is right cruel in a way.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
It's like endurance athletics, but with your mind and your body.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Totally. Yeah, you have a day job running puzzle hunts
under your own brand, and like puzzle hunt activity is
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?
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Yes, you're onto us. We didn't mean to do it
that way, but the market found us. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
What do you think it is about? Like financial people
a puzzle hunts? Like where do they go together?
Speaker 4 (18:21):
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
(18:42):
already earlier in life.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Does every do the mystery hunting?
Speaker 4 (18:46):
I don't think everyone does it, and a lot of
people who do it are also not currently at MIT.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
I've been invited on team. Is that it seemed like
more trouble than I was worth.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's like a three day event
or a four day event.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
And one hundred people and you can do it rightly.
It just seems like a lot.
Speaker 4 (19:04):
It is a lot. You're not wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
About 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 brain power. You know,
(19:26):
how do you effectively deploy one hundred 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.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Yeah, I was reading a Courts article from twenty thirteen.
I think it was because Midnight Madness went on a
bit of a hiatus and then it came back right
And the article is talking about how originally the thinking,
you know, among the Goldmen Sacks teams who participated, was
that they wanted to stack their teams with quants. They
just wanted a lot of big brains. But the team
that ended up winning was a group that worked together.
(20:02):
I think they were client facing, and they shocked their
winning up too, 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.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yeah, and also like if it's all quants, like you
want different kinds of intelligence too, like in solving the
puzzles as well as in creating the puzzle, 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. He like interviewed a financial firm,
and like the idea of like getting different types of
intelligence together and trying to delegate responsibility and brandstorm together
(20:35):
does seem like useful in the job. And then it
hadn't even occurred to me that, like thee hundred person
MIT mystery hunt teams are an enormous management problem. But yes,
like if you can manage a puzzle hunt team of
one hundred people, that does seem useful for managing a
hedge fund.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
They create custom software platforms just to manage the puzzles.
It's incredible. I did want to go back to you
were correcting that at midnight men is we're out of
Goldman And I'd say maybe still less than I mean,
maybe forty percent of our teams are Goldman thirty to
forty percent of our teams, so they're a huge supporter.
And just to give the context for your listeners, this
(21:12):
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 huge The biggest showing is from Goldman,
but there's probably fifteen to twenty different firms represented, everything
(21:33):
from 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
(21:55):
like they just look at it as a donation and
let the people who want to show up.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
But right, the idea is like basically Midnight Madness, as
the funders are 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.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah. Yeah, And so we'll have twenty five teams duking
it out on October fourth, the early hours of October fifth,
duking it out for the title of the most you know,
most intelligent and really best.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
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 car and
solving a puzzle on and 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 have to like get clues, like going
(22:44):
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 talking about the puzzle aspect,
but like as designers, I feel like you're more interested
in like the cool experiences side of it. You're talking
about that.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Yeah, 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 mid Night Madness and learned that there was
a puzzle that year where teams had controls that were
(23:25):
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,
(23:46):
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.
(24:09):
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
(24:32):
production value of the game and reallocating a different kind
of percentage to the charity versus.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
The more to the charity. To be clear, now we
don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Do you have a list of like here are some
cool locations, let's see if you can get them, and
then like often get told no or.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Like absolutely if you want to like get.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
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 like what are you talking about?
Speaker 1 (24:56):
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 two am. Some
things are wow, we're never going to get that, And
then people come back to us and I'm like, yeah,
about twenty five hundred dollars and you're like, great, let's
do it.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
What's like the most surprising location thing you've gotten access to?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Last game?
Speaker 4 (25:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
We could also ask the inverse of that question, I mean,
where have you been turned down from that you really
wanted to happen?
Speaker 1 (25:39):
You know, every year there's a theme. In twenty twenty
three 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
the seat of the idea is that somehow they're still
alive and we have to bring them home, and so
we're going to do a cosmonaut training course, like in
a swimming pool in New York, City, and so I
was trying to get one of those huge inflatable like
(26:02):
water obstacle courses. You know, We're going to like order
this ten thousand dollars 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 gonna let us inflate this giant obstacle course
(26:26):
in the pool.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
I've always wanted to do a puzzle in the Natural
History Museum, like with the Big Whale.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
And Night at the Museum style.
Speaker 4 (26:33):
Yeah, exactly. You have to become like an official partner
of the museum and it's like an annual membership that
costs thirty thousand dollars, and then there's all these other
hoops you have to jump through and.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
You can get a Bloomberg terminal with that.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
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 forty first Street all the way to the library,
through Times Square, through Bryant Bryant Park, and at night
(27:07):
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 the street and have people go in and there's
like a speakeasy type establishment with like a live band
inside a box truck 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
(27:28):
like are hidden in that New York City is so
good at kind of concealing.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
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 i'd been diet madness with production value
is what they are. Like there's some amount of like
doing puzzles on cool physical objects. Like what are some
like cool physical objects that have been purposed as puzzles.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I have one sitting right here it's a like a
palaneer orb crystal ball that we distributed the 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 twenty twenty
one scattered all over Central Park, and as you approach
(28:14):
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 atlasio. I
don't know, but I've read about it in one of
the many articles that I'm sure you guys said, was
the circuit board where you had to assemble circle circuit
board and then one of the transistors overheated and you
(28:35):
discovered that the circuit board was actually a map of
New York City subway stations, and when you looked at
it through an infrared camera, you know it was identifying
which station to go to. So that's another example of
something that lives in my head as a great use
of a physical object.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
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 Maddness seems like a different
beast entirely in that you know it runs overnight.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Yeah, Like, what is your time expectation for this year's
Midnight Madness?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Like?
Speaker 2 (29:22):
When does it start? And when do you expect the
last team to finish? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (29:26):
About twelves and fourteen hours, depending on how fast teams are.
The idea is to start it, Yeah, early afternoon one
or two, and then it ends sometimes shortly after midnight,
hopefully not too much longer than that.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
So it's in early October. When do you start planning
for it?
Speaker 4 (29:43):
Typically about a year in advance, so it's about a
year in the making.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Do you design games for like a lot of big
Wall Street for can you, like, say, or your repeat
clients or something.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
Yes, we have a lot of Wall Street clients. That's
our biggest audience and our biggest client base.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
We have liked 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.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Something you can handle the most.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Well, you know, there's a difference between who can handle
the most and who wants to give off the vibe
like they can.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Hold of the most.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Right, Yea, we have NDA. All of these companies.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Are so secret we'll beleeve them out.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
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 twenty twenty one after they did
Midnight Manas 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.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
I do want to know where bridge Will falls on
the can handle things and want to give the impression,
but it seems rude to make you.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Answer they're great. I mean, don't make us pick between
our children. We love all of our puzzle shouldern 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
from Bridgewater at least the point of contact and our
(31:28):
who helps us plan their events, is that they want
the puzzles, they want the goods.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
Yeah, they want the brutality. They like it to be difficult.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
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 Front and a
Bridgewater and a Goldman and where they all function in
this world. It's been quite the education.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
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 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
(32:12):
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 the companies that are
doing well for us, we're also doing well in the market.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
And then when those same companies three years later stopped
doing well, it meant something.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Stop doing around the puzzles. The puzzles were like a
leading indicator of the stock or exactly. Yeah, as a
hedge found ever been like you're gonnat puzzles come work.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
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 that seem like an overlap in
the puzzle creator community. Like, is there like a trend
(33:22):
where a lot of people have a certain degree or
a certain background.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
What I've done puzzles, there's always a like cryptic crossword
cluing type puzzle, and I'm always the guy who solves this.
Like that's why one contribution to the team.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Right right, A good puzzle creation team has a good
puzzle is created by people with a lot of different backgrounds.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
I assume that when you do team building events, it's
like a company like two hundred people. But do you
ever have like these five people are going to do
a puzzle on together.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
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 three hundred four hundred?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
John, Well, can you tell me about the groups of four? Like,
how does that come in?
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Either someone's birthday, it's a birthday party. Usually you know
someone who really likes puzzles, and either they can afford
our 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 fifty years
(34:39):
and all about their kids and and those are really
fun too.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
We've done many birthdays for CEOs of like hedge funds.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Yeah, I was gonna say, like, this feels like a
classic hedgehund manager fiftieth birthday party.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
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. This is a small,
small fund and they said, Okay, I'm gonna I want
to do this across Europe for my fiftieth birthday. And
I was like, yes, let's do it. Call us and
then they never showed.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
But you have like preliminary budget.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
No, no, we didn't. We didn't even get yeah, get
that far. But it was it was a really fun
It was for a fun that was celebrating their twenty
fifth 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 into a cross
Europe scavenger hunt, but wasn't to be.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Yeah. Well 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 geuing, Like, what do
you think is causing that?
Speaker 1 (35:46):
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 employer retention and they're pulling back the perks. And
(36:08):
so we've seen pre pandemic specifically, we do a lot
of like fifty to eighty percent 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
(36:30):
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 our in
(36:51):
our clients.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
As well, so it's like if you work at Facebook,
like ten years ago you were like I really want
to solve puzzles, Like I'm motivated to like use my brain.
And now it's like I'm going to rest invest and
like going a puzzle hunt.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
I don't want to say exactly, but yeah, that's 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,
(37:24):
no idea what we're doing with NFTs, and so reading
your article helped me like 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 bord A Biacht
Club universe, and and it was a we did get paid, Yeah, yeah,
(37:44):
we got paid. It was 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
(38:06):
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 prodect 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 it's a real moment in time.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
We've talked about hedgphones and tech firms, like we didn't
even talk about like what does the chart of like
your crypto expressure. Yes, I never heard from them.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
It's 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 board apes, or to be more specific,
the mutant apes, which is a whole subgenre of apes.
Speaker 5 (38:59):
I think we'll end it there, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
John and Ryan, thank you so much for coming on.
This is fun.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
It's great to be here. Hope to see you on
the streets.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Thanks honored to be your section guests. Yeah wow, what
a distinction.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
And that was The Money Stuff Podcast.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
I'm Matt Luvian and I'm Katie Greifeld.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
You can find my work by subscribing to The Money
Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Dot com, and you can find me on Bloomberg TV
every day on Open Interest between nine to eleven am Eastern.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
I'd love to hear from you. You can send an
email to Money Pod at Bloomberg dot net, ask us
a question and we might answer it on air.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening
right now and leave us a review. It helps more
people find the show.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Ana ma Asarakus
and Moses onm Ur.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Theme music was composed by Blake Maples.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Brandon Francis Nianimens, our executive producer.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
And Stage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Thanks for listening to The Stuff Podcasts. We'll be back
next week with more stuff
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I feel like it's going to be weird to do
an entro, but like it's the Money Stuff podcast. We're
here today with I think our second episode with a guest.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Yes, two guests, Our second and third guests.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Second and third guests. They are Ryan Patch and John
Seal of the Great Gotham Challenge, two creators of puzzle hunts. Welcome.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
That's about all you need to say. We make puzzle hunts.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
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 and Ryan,
(01:00):
thank you.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Coming soon to New York City street near you.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
This is a podcast probably about money stuff related to money.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
That's what we build it as.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
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
(01:34):
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?
Speaker 4 (01:42):
I think sometime in the nineties, maybe before the Mit
mystery un started, I get the sense that that was
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 sinning puzzle hunts, we
weren't aware of any of the existing ones. We thought
(02:03):
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
(02:25):
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,
combining elements of something like the Amazing Race with elements
(02:46):
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 metal and arrive
at the end first or with the highest standing that
they can.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
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 and.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
My experience, Yeah, well, puzzle.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Hunts are pretty niche, but.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
The escape rooms came after puzzle hunts.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, that's why I was like that 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.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
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 stimula. You know,
escape rooms are great because you know, at the end
of sixty 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.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Next at three am. Often.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
What differentiates a puzzle hunt from a scavenger hunt or
is that just a meaningless distinction?
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Is the puzzles absolutely you get.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Clues and you have to think critically, and scavenger hunts.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
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 crossworthy or language
(04:41):
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 in another set
of papers, so there's always some very specific activity. Now,
we came kind of this from more the immersion angle.
We kind of asked ourselves the question to look like
if people felt like they were in a movie, and
(05:03):
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
(05:25):
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 ten year old kids adjacent, and scavenger Hunt the
(05:46):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
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 that I think I did Midnight Matter Compass that
might have been partly your doing. And I have a sense,
like an inarticulate sense of what puzzle hunt puzzles feel
(06:37):
like you know, I've done I don't know, four or
five puzzle hunts and 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 can talk about
on a podcast.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
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
(07:13):
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
(07:36):
Josh Dabner, and it's a puzzle in which you receive
a rap sheet that looks like a police description of
several perpetrators of criminals, and each one has a description
and then 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
(07:58):
looks like to act you 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
(08:20):
might describe a criminal. To recognize that each of the
seven is representing the seven highest peaks on each continent.
And 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,
(08:42):
you have to be able to make this mental leap
and recognize that one thing is actually representing another.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
How do you make them difficult without being infuriating? Because
this is something different. But Bloomberg has a weekly quiz quiz.
Go Matt, you've played it, you've written. I used to
be the cure 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
(09:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Yes, you're our sister in pain, I see.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
I think that's the number one skill of a good
puzzle creator. I think that right there is the magic
sauce is 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
(09:44):
looking back on it, it's like, of course that was
the answer. It could never have not been that 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
it sucked in the moment, but when you look back
on it, it's a pleasureful thing. And so creating that
(10:05):
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 raged quick. It was in two thousand and nine.
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
(10:26):
four hour thing. Everyone just texted us after our four
and it 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 eleven years.
And a lot of it is play testing, Like we
have a community of people. They just play test our
puzzles and they time themselves and we make sure we
know how long a puzzle should take and what the
(10:48):
right deviation is. And it's also a lot of argument,
like we've just got a 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 twelve rounds until we
find something that we all agree on and 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 its playtesting. John and I are creative by nature,
(11:10):
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 play test things. We play test things thoroughly.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
I think another part of the answer to Katie's question
is is when I've done puzzle hunts, 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 like can you talking about how
do you think about that?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
It's like your personal tormentor.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Right right exactly. And this is something very unique about
the Wall Street Vibe is that the game controllers are
known to be a little malicious and a little kount
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
(12:18):
seems mean, and they're like, oh no, it's what people want,
Like it's the 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
(12:39):
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 devations
(13:00):
of two hundred percent on times.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
My experience of like Compass or Midnight Matis 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.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Yeah. You want to feel like you can fail so
that when you succeed, you feel good about it.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Can we talk about Midnight madnas. 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,
(14:10):
and it was called Midnight Madness because it started I
don't know four pm and went until two pm the
next day.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Everything you've heard is correct, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
And it was run by I think Alicia we wasel
at Goldman and then it became so overwhelming that my
understanding was like the winners got to run it the
next time, and I know, like Colin Tykel ran it
for a while, and that is like, in my understanding,
the premiere like Wall Street Puzzle Hunt and all of
the teams are like eight Goldman teams and six Chain
(14:41):
Street teams. Is that basically correct?
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Most of that's correct. Alisha 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
(15:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
All of these people have like real jobs in the
financial industry and also extracurricularly designed these insane all night
puzzle hunts.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
As opposed to us who have fake jobs in the
financial industry. Yes, that's correct. Now we have real jobs
in puzzle hunts.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, exactly, So this is your job, it's not their job.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Is a little more sustainable for us, but yes, 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.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
So you guys are professional puzzle hunt makers and they
are professional headsphund matters. As you look at their work,
what do you think were they good at it? If
you have like the regular puzzle HNK community and then
you have like the headshund guys, is there a different
style or mindset.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
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
of 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,
(16:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
We're a little more bread crumb, 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 red crumb.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
I'm with you. I've had some Midnight Madness experiences where
you're like, you get the hnt in your No one
would have gotten that.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
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 they
(17:30):
do crave a certain amount of intensity and some would
even say torture that I think was surprising to us.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Yeah, I mean, just the fact that it is sort
of runs overnight is right cruel in a way.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
It's like endurance athletics, but with your mind and your body.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Totally. Yeah, you have a day job running puzzle hunts
under your own brand, and like puzzle hunt activity is
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?
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Yes, you're onto us. We didn't mean to do it
that way, but the market found us. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
What do you think it is about? Like financial people
a puzzle hunts? Like where do they go together?
Speaker 4 (18:21):
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
(18:42):
already earlier in life.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Does every do the mystery hunting?
Speaker 4 (18:46):
I don't think everyone does it, and a lot of
people who do it are also not currently at MIT.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
I've been invited on team. Is that it seemed like
more trouble than I was worth.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's like a three day event
or a four day event.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
And one hundred people and you can do it rightly.
It just seems like a lot.
Speaker 4 (19:04):
It is a lot. You're not wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
About 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 brain power. You know,
(19:26):
how do you effectively deploy one hundred 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.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Yeah, I was reading a Courts article from twenty thirteen.
I think it was because Midnight Madness went on a
bit of a hiatus and then it came back right
And the article is talking about how originally the thinking,
you know, among the Goldmen Sacks teams who participated, was
that they wanted to stack their teams with quants. They
just wanted a lot of big brains. But the team
that ended up winning was a group that worked together.
(20:02):
I think they were client facing, and they shocked their
winning up too, 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.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yeah, and also like if it's all quants, like you
want different kinds of intelligence too, like in solving the
puzzles as well as in creating the puzzle, 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. He like interviewed a financial firm,
and like the idea of like getting different types of
intelligence together and trying to delegate responsibility and brandstorm together
(20:35):
does seem like useful in the job. And then it
hadn't even occurred to me that, like thee hundred person
MIT mystery hunt teams are an enormous management problem. But yes,
like if you can manage a puzzle hunt team of
one hundred people, that does seem useful for managing a
hedge fund.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
They create custom software platforms just to manage the puzzles.
It's incredible. I did want to go back to you
were correcting that at midnight men is we're out of
Goldman And I'd say maybe still less than I mean,
maybe forty percent of our teams are Goldman thirty to
forty percent of our teams, so they're a huge supporter.
And just to give the context for your listeners, this
(21:12):
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 huge The biggest showing is from Goldman,
but there's probably fifteen to twenty different firms represented, everything
(21:33):
from 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
(21:55):
like they just look at it as a donation and
let the people who want to show up.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
But right, the idea is like basically Midnight Madness, as
the funders are 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.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah. Yeah, And so we'll have twenty five teams duking
it out on October fourth, the early hours of October fifth,
duking it out for the title of the most you know,
most intelligent and really best.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
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 car and
solving a puzzle on and 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 have to like get clues, like going
(22:44):
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 talking about the puzzle aspect,
but like as designers, I feel like you're more interested
in like the cool experiences side of it. You're talking
about that.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Yeah, 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 mid Night Madness and learned that there was
a puzzle that year where teams had controls that were
(23:25):
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,
(23:46):
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.
(24:09):
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
(24:32):
production value of the game and reallocating a different kind
of percentage to the charity versus.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
The more to the charity. To be clear, now we
don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Do you have a list of like here are some
cool locations, let's see if you can get them, and
then like often get told no or.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Like absolutely if you want to like get.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
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 like what are you talking about?
Speaker 1 (24:56):
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 two am. Some
things are wow, we're never going to get that, And
then people come back to us and I'm like, yeah,
about twenty five hundred dollars and you're like, great, let's
do it.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
What's like the most surprising location thing you've gotten access to?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Last game?
Speaker 4 (25:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
We could also ask the inverse of that question, I mean,
where have you been turned down from that you really
wanted to happen?
Speaker 1 (25:39):
You know, every year there's a theme. In twenty twenty
three 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
the seat of the idea is that somehow they're still
alive and we have to bring them home, and so
we're going to do a cosmonaut training course, like in
a swimming pool in New York, City, and so I
was trying to get one of those huge inflatable like
(26:02):
water obstacle courses. You know, We're going to like order
this ten thousand dollars 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 gonna let us inflate this giant obstacle course
(26:26):
in the pool.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
I've always wanted to do a puzzle in the Natural
History Museum, like with the Big Whale.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
And Night at the Museum style.
Speaker 4 (26:33):
Yeah, exactly. You have to become like an official partner
of the museum and it's like an annual membership that
costs thirty thousand dollars, and then there's all these other
hoops you have to jump through and.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
You can get a Bloomberg terminal with that.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
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 forty first Street all the way to the library,
through Times Square, through Bryant Bryant Park, and at night
(27:07):
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 the street and have people go in and there's
like a speakeasy type establishment with like a live band
inside a box truck 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
(27:28):
like are hidden in that New York City is so
good at kind of concealing.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
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 i'd been diet madness with production value
is what they are. Like there's some amount of like
doing puzzles on cool physical objects. Like what are some
like cool physical objects that have been purposed as puzzles.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I have one sitting right here it's a like a
palaneer orb crystal ball that we distributed the 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 twenty twenty
one scattered all over Central Park, and as you approach
(28:14):
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 atlasio. I
don't know, but I've read about it in one of
the many articles that I'm sure you guys said, was
the circuit board where you had to assemble circle circuit
board and then one of the transistors overheated and you
(28:35):
discovered that the circuit board was actually a map of
New York City subway stations, and when you looked at
it through an infrared camera, you know it was identifying
which station to go to. So that's another example of
something that lives in my head as a great use
of a physical object.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
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 Maddness seems like a different
beast entirely in that you know it runs overnight.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Yeah, Like, what is your time expectation for this year's
Midnight Madness?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Like?
Speaker 2 (29:22):
When does it start? And when do you expect the
last team to finish? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (29:26):
About twelves and fourteen hours, depending on how fast teams are.
The idea is to start it, Yeah, early afternoon one
or two, and then it ends sometimes shortly after midnight,
hopefully not too much longer than that.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
So it's in early October. When do you start planning
for it?
Speaker 4 (29:43):
Typically about a year in advance, so it's about a
year in the making.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Do you design games for like a lot of big
Wall Street for can you, like, say, or your repeat
clients or something.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
Yes, we have a lot of Wall Street clients. That's
our biggest audience and our biggest client base.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
We have liked 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.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Something you can handle the most.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Well, you know, there's a difference between who can handle
the most and who wants to give off the vibe
like they can.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Hold of the most.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Right, Yea, we have NDA. All of these companies.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Are so secret we'll beleeve them out.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
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 twenty twenty one after they did
Midnight Manas 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.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
I do want to know where bridge Will falls on
the can handle things and want to give the impression,
but it seems rude to make you.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Answer they're great. I mean, don't make us pick between
our children. We love all of our puzzle shouldern 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
from Bridgewater at least the point of contact and our
(31:28):
who helps us plan their events, is that they want
the puzzles, they want the goods.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
Yeah, they want the brutality. They like it to be difficult.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
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 Front and a
Bridgewater and a Goldman and where they all function in
this world. It's been quite the education.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
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 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
(32:12):
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 the companies that are
doing well for us, we're also doing well in the market.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
And then when those same companies three years later stopped
doing well, it meant something.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Stop doing around the puzzles. The puzzles were like a
leading indicator of the stock or exactly. Yeah, as a
hedge found ever been like you're gonnat puzzles come work.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
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 that seem like an overlap in
the puzzle creator community. Like, is there like a trend
(33:22):
where a lot of people have a certain degree or
a certain background.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
What I've done puzzles, there's always a like cryptic crossword
cluing type puzzle, and I'm always the guy who solves this.
Like that's why one contribution to the team.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Right right, A good puzzle creation team has a good
puzzle is created by people with a lot of different backgrounds.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
I assume that when you do team building events, it's
like a company like two hundred people. But do you
ever have like these five people are going to do
a puzzle on together.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
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 three hundred four hundred?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
John, Well, can you tell me about the groups of four? Like,
how does that come in?
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Either someone's birthday, it's a birthday party. Usually you know
someone who really likes puzzles, and either they can afford
our 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 fifty years
(34:39):
and all about their kids and and those are really
fun too.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
We've done many birthdays for CEOs of like hedge funds.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Yeah, I was gonna say, like, this feels like a
classic hedgehund manager fiftieth birthday party.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
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. This is a small,
small fund and they said, Okay, I'm gonna I want
to do this across Europe for my fiftieth birthday. And
I was like, yes, let's do it. Call us and
then they never showed.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
But you have like preliminary budget.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
No, no, we didn't. We didn't even get yeah, get
that far. But it was it was a really fun
It was for a fun that was celebrating their twenty
fifth 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 into a cross
Europe scavenger hunt, but wasn't to be.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Yeah. Well 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 geuing, Like, what do
you think is causing that?
Speaker 1 (35:46):
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 employer retention and they're pulling back the perks. And
(36:08):
so we've seen pre pandemic specifically, we do a lot
of like fifty to eighty percent 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
(36:30):
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 our in
(36:51):
our clients.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
As well, so it's like if you work at Facebook,
like ten years ago you were like I really want
to solve puzzles, Like I'm motivated to like use my brain.
And now it's like I'm going to rest invest and
like going a puzzle hunt.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
I don't want to say exactly, but yeah, that's 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,
(37:24):
no idea what we're doing with NFTs, and so reading
your article helped me like 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 bord A Biacht
Club universe, and and it was a we did get paid, Yeah, yeah,
(37:44):
we got paid. It was 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
(38:06):
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 prodect 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 it's a real moment in time.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
We've talked about hedgphones and tech firms, like we didn't
even talk about like what does the chart of like
your crypto expressure. Yes, I never heard from them.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
It's 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 board apes, or to be more specific,
the mutant apes, which is a whole subgenre of apes.
Speaker 5 (38:59):
I think we'll end it there, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
John and Ryan, thank you so much for coming on.
This is fun.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
It's great to be here. Hope to see you on
the streets.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Thanks honored to be your section guests. Yeah wow, what
a distinction.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
And that was The Money Stuff Podcast.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
I'm Matt Luvian and I'm Katie Greifeld.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
You can find my work by subscribing to The Money
Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Dot com, and you can find me on Bloomberg TV
every day on Open Interest between nine to eleven am Eastern.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
I'd love to hear from you. You can send an
email to Money Pod at Bloomberg dot net, ask us
a question and we might answer it on air.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening
right now and leave us a review. It helps more
people find the show.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Ana ma Asarakus
and Moses onm Ur.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Theme music was composed by Blake Maples.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Brandon Francis Nianimens, our executive producer.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
And Stage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Thanks for listening to The Stuff Podcasts. We'll be back
next week with more stuff
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