Re-run: Midnight Madness: Ryan Patch and Jon Seale
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Hello, and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast. This week, we have a rerun of an interview that we first aired back in May 2025. It's a conversation that Katie and I had with Ryan Patch and John Seale, the guys who run Midnight Madness, the huge overnight puzzle hunt across New York City. Midnight Madness is happening again in just a couple of weeks on October 10th, so we thought it was a perfect time to revisit this conversation. Enjoy. 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. With two
guests.
Our second and third guests.
Second and third guests. They are Ryan Patch and John Seale 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 probably 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. 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
invent them. It's not my experience.
Yeah. Well, puzzle hunts are pretty niche.
Yeah, 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 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.
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