MAD MONEY
BY BRAD HERZOG
How thirteen one-hundredths of a second
made for fifteen minutes of fame,
plus a little fortune
For a while last spring--okay, forty minutes of prime time--I was Kato Kaelin, the person who shot J.R., and that rainbow-wigged sports fan with the "John 3:16" sign all rolled into one. Because on April 4, a massive ABC television audience tuned in to find out "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" And the answer was . . . me.
It was an exhilarating, intoxicating, silly, surreal experience. And after hearing Regis Philbin offer up what has become the catch-phrase of the millennium--"Is that your final answer?"--all I can think of are questions.
For $100: The hypothetical evolutionary gap between ape and man is most commonly called:
A. Missing Link
B. Gap Man
C. Evolutionary Eddie
D. Dad
I've evolved into this: a lazy, inhibited cynic. I'm certainly not the game-show type. But "Millionaire" offers big ratings (TV's highest, three times a week) and big bucks (like the name says). The premise is simple: a contestant has a shot at fifteen questions, each progressively harder and more lucrative. Answer them all correctly, win a million bucks. The appeal may seem obvious. But why would someone like me, who avoids fads like the plague, suddenly decide to become the television equivalent of the keynote speaker at a Beanie Baby convention?
Luckily, Robert Frank knows a lot about the pursuit of wealth. The Goldwin Smith professor of economics, ethics, and public policy at Cornell, Frank is the author of Luxury Fever, on America's obsession with big spending. In 1995, he says, there were 190,000 people in the U.S. worth $10 million or more; by 1998 there were 275,000. "The number of people with a lot of money has just been exploding lately," he says, "and what they do with it is very much on display." His take on the "Millionaire" phenomenon: the rise of the dot-com economy has made people more obsessed with quick riches. "There's a lot of easy money out there. Until a few months ago, if you told a plausible story about an e-commerce venture, people would rain money on you. A lot of people saw this and wondered, 'Why not me?'"
Indeed, the numbers are astonishing. Some 240,000 people a day dial the show's 800 number for the first round of qualification. Being self-employed, I dialed once a day (the limit) for about a month. When I finally got through, an automated voice asked three questions ("Put these celebrities in chronological order of their date of birth: Spalding Gray, Seth Green, Bobby Brown, Redd Foxx"). I had ten seconds to answer each correctly by pushing the buttons. More often than not, I failed. About 98 percent of callers do.
Six times, however, I succeeded, and my name was thrown into a pool with the other 5,000 or so first-round qualifiers. The next morning, I awaited a random phone call put through to just forty of those 5,000. Five times, it never came. Then the phone rang. It was a real person, telling me to call a certain number at a certain hour on a certain day to answer five more questions. If I was among the ten people to answer all five correctly in the fastest time, I'd be on the show.
The subjects of that trivia test ranged from the Teapot Dome Scandal to Mary Lou Retton. Finally, there was this synapse-snapper: "Put the following ancient civilizations in the order in which they were established: Assyrian, Classical Greek, Mayan, Sumerian." I didn't have time to say, "What, are you kidding?" I just pushed a few buttons and hung up. Ninety minutes later, I distinctly remember two ringing sounds. One was the phone, with a producer telling me they'd be flying me and my wife to New York. The other was a cash register in my head.
For $500: Which comedian became the spokesperson for Jell-O pudding in 1974?
A. Bill Cosby
B. Steve Martin
C. Billy Crystal
D. Robert Klein
I couldn't eat a thing. Having flown from California to New York, and having slept not at all, I arrived with the other nine contestants at the ABC studios at 7:30 the next morning. Our show didn't begin taping until about 5 p.m. In between, they fed us three meals, and I managed to nibble at a slice of bread.
The hours leading up to The Hour are designed to make the ten contestants feel as comfortable as possible. Each has a producer who conducts a comprehensive interview followed by an informational speech by the show's attorney and an inspirational talk by its executive producer. Taking precautions not to repeat the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" goes so far as to require a producer to accompany contestants to the bathroom.
Eventually, they let us practice. For those who haven't seen the show (have you heard Al Gore is running for President?), the ten contestants vie for a spot in the "hot seat," the chair across from Sir Regis himself. To get there, you have to finish first in the Fastest Finger round, in which the questions are of the put-these-four-things-in-order variety. Five times that morning we were served up practice queries which were much easier than the usual fare. Five times I went down in flames.
I was in a panic all day. My hands shook. My knees wobbled. I paced like an expectant father. Bruce Levitt, a professor in Cornell's Department of Theater, Dance, and Film, says this is normal--such anxiety may actually be beneficial. "All actors or performers usually have some kind of nervousness," he says. "Some people feel that if they get nervous before a performance, there's an energy boost and it heightens their concentration."
He may be right. After failing miserably in five practice rounds, the moment of truth finally arrived: "Put these female characters in order of when they first appeared on TV: Claire Huxtable, Marge Simpson, Edith Bunker, Ellie Ewing." And I nailed it. I answered in 4.96 seconds, exactly thirteen-hundredths of a second faster than the only other contestant who came close.
For $1,000: According to the popular 1963 song, "Puff the Magic Dragon lives by the sea" in which town?
A. Honah-Lee
B. Monterey
C. Honolulu
D. Gallipoli
I live less than a mile from Monterey, California; a few years ago, I wrote an article about the song, whose lyrics were penned at Cornell by Peter Yarrow '59. I never mentioned this to Regis, but we did discuss my article about Dr. Joyce Brothers '47, who parlayed her triumph on "The $64,000 Question" into a long and lucrative career. "If I can match her," I told him, "I'd be very happy."
I don't believe in destiny or ghosts or karma. But you see . . . I have this friend, Julie. We rang in the millennium together. My mother-in-law was her sixth grade teacher. Her husband was my twin brother's college roommate. At the time I taped "Millionaire," only about 175 people had made it into the "hot seat." Yet the person in that chair immediately before me--a woman who was still in the midst of her questions from the previous taping and thus carried over onto my show--was Julie.
It's the kind of thing that begs scientific explanation. Who better to ask than Steven Strogatz, a professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, who gained some fame of his own for his mathematical exploration of the small-world phenomenon in social networks (popularly known as "six degrees of separation")?
When I suggested that the odds of two friends sharing the hot seat must be one in a million, Strogatz--who has been calling daily to try out for the show himself--said this: Sociologists have estimated that each of us knows no more than one thousand people on a first-name basis. There are some 275 million people in the United States, so the chances of a randomly chosen American being an acquaintance is about one in 275,000. "I don't see any clear way to calculate this number," says Strogatz. "My prejudice is that these things usually aren't that surprising. Our intuition is lousy as far as what we should expect. What we often call coincidence is actually statistically highly probable." Then he thinks about it for a while and calls me back. "I'm starting to come around to the idea that this is a pretty amazing coincidence," he says, perhaps something on the order of one in 10,000.
For $8,000: Since 1949, which of these images has been a part of the logo for Hallmark cards?
A. Heart
B. Star
C. Crown
D. Key
There is a Hallmark "Gold Crown" store twelve blocks from my house. I've walked past it a hundred times. I didn't think of it once. There was a vague crown-like image somewhere in the recesses of my mind, but I couldn't retrieve it with full confidence. According to psychology professor Ulric Neisser, one basic explanation is that, well, it was never really integrated into my brain in the first place. "When it comes to remembering things and verbalizing them," says Neisser, "you can do it better with things you've actually talked about." Furthermore, he says, the very kind of concentration Levitt was talking about can actually work against you when it comes to answering trivia questions. "You get rattled, and when you're excited the adrenaline is pumping," he says. "That tends to narrow your field of attention. It's a good strategy in some situations, like when you're fighting for your life. But if you're trying to retrieve a lot of things that are randomly stored, you're a lot less likely to remember them."
They say 29 million households were watching. That's a larger audience than the Beatles's first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, nearly Super Bowl numbers. It's more than the entire population of Canada. On top of it all, the music and lighting are designed to increase tension. "There is a difference between tension, which is healthy on stage, and tenseness, which is not healthy," says Levitt. "My suspicion is that some people on that show experience tenseness, as opposed to tension, because there's so much stimulation and so many things going through your mind that it's difficult to come down to a simple point of concentration."
Difficult? The best I remember, the following are some of the thoughts that were careening around my brain: "I can't believe this is happening . . . There must be 50 million people watching me . . . Am I thinking clearly? . . . I wish I could exchange glances with my wife . . . Why do I keep touching my nose? . . . That Regis sure has some white teeth . . ." You get the picture. It's like trying to defend an honors thesis while juggling chainsaws. Or, as Neisser puts it: "You start thinking about how badly you think you're doing, and a whole lot of self-critical thoughts start circulating."
Now I have to admit something embarrassing. I studied for the show. I studied hard. How can one possibly study . . . everything? Well, I tried. In the week I had to prepare, I read almanacs and encyclopedias, combed through the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and scrutinized the Concise World Atlas. I learned the names of the Three Musketeers, six inert gases, seven Ancient Wonders of the World, and Twelve Apostles.
So what do I get? My $2,000 question was: "Who invented the cotton gin?" Does anybody really know what a cotton gin does? No. But from about the fifth grade on, everyone knows Eli Whitney invented the darn thing.
But I was stuck on this Hallmark question. Had I been sitting on my couch at home and shouting answers into a vacuum, I would have gone with my instincts. Instead, I chose to use a lifeline. You get three lifelines on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" It's the jewel in the show's design. You can poll the 187 members of the studio audience. You can opt for the "50-50," which removes two incorrect answers. Or you can phone a friend.
I had polled the audience on the $4,000 question, regarding the name of the comic strip character Dilbert's pet dog. I knew the answer was Dogbert. I even said so. But I wasn't positive, so I asked the audience and they confirmed it. I had wasted a lifeline. Now, I was pretty sure of the answer again, but I used the "50-50" option, which left "heart" and "crown." With the former beating 120 times a minute, I chose the latter.
Looking back, I rationalize that I was playing it safe. However, Levitt puts a different spin on it. Anxiety is heightened by added pressures, he explains, pressures like time, money, and "an element of very public humiliation."
He may be right. I may have been playing not to lose. And I had one lifeline left.
For $32,000: Which band holds the record for the highest-grossing North American concert tour?
A. U2
B. The Eagles
C. Pink Floyd
D. The Rolling Stones
"That's a tough question," I smiled. I wasn't smiling on the inside. Once you reach the $32,000 plateau, you get to keep at least that. Before that level, an incorrect answer drops you back to $1,000. It's the clever catch of the game. Risk vs. reward. Courage vs. conservatism. Sure, I would have loved to have won the million, but thirty-two grand was my more realistic goal. So I was about to use my final lifeline to get there. But oh, did I have options.
Each contestant is told to come equipped with phone numbers for five people who serve as phone-a-friends. Generally, people opt for a father-in-law or a colleague or an old tenth-grade English teacher. But why leave anything to chance? I assembled a Dream Team of lifelines, each of whom agreed to sit patiently for hours waiting for a phone call that would likely never come.
One was a mystery writer who's well-versed in subjects from "Star Trek" to Shakespeare. Another was a former neighbor who's a radiologist and the kind of guy who runs the table in Trivial Pursuit. The other three? I had never met them in my life. They were a friend of friend, a cousin of a friend, even a friend of a cousin of a friend.
Charles is a teacher in San Francisco, a PhD in history who plays four musical instruments, has lived in several foreign countries, and was once a contestant on "Jeopardy." Danny is a Harvard undergrad, twice a runner-up in the Massachusetts Geography Bee. The final Dream Teamer was Ben, an editor at the New Yorker whose resume includes stints as a movie critic, music critic, and grad student in literature. The guy once competed in the National Rock 'n Roll Trivia Bowl, for crying out loud. If he didn't know this . . .
"You understand," Regis kidded Ben, "the reputation of the New Yorker is on the line."
Silence. "All right, we'll see . . ."
I had thirty seconds to tell Ben the question and answers and get a reply.
"I'm not 100 percent positive," he said, "but I would guess that it would be the Rolling Stones. Let me just . . ."
Click. Time was up.
After a minute of hemming and hawing, I went with Ben's choice and
. . . he was right. A few minutes later--when I decided that the crossword puzzle (not horoscopes, weather predictions, or wedding announcements) debuted in the New York World in 1913--I won $64,000.
For $125,000: Which of these American westerns was not a remake of a Japanese film?
A. The Magnificent Seven
B. The Outrage
C. High Noon
D. A Fistful of Dollars
"I'm pretty sure The Magnificent Seven was a remake," I said. "The other three, I'm not sure."
Three things could happen: I could answer correctly (figuring I had about a one in three chance of doing so) and make another $61,000. I could answer incorrectly and lose $32,000. Or I could decide not to answer at all, keeping the $64,000. Only after the fact does psychology professor and statistics guru Tom Gilovich reveal the math behind my decision. "If you think there really is a one-in-three chance of winning, you multiply .33 by the possible winnings, in this case $61,000. And multiply .67 by what you would lose. You add those two together and see whether it's a positive or a negative number," he explains.
Let's see, that's $20,130 on the plus side and $21,440 on the minus side. Close enough to be a coin flip, right? "That's if all you're considering is that round," says Gilovich. "But of course all you could lose is the $32,000, and you could conceivably win a lot more by continuing the game."
Translation: It's probably worth the risk. I had been telling people that, should I be confronted with this exact scenario, I'd take a stab at it. To friends who've seen me stay too long at a blackjack table, this would come as no surprise. Of course, that strategy was crafted from the comfort of my living room. But with real money on the line? "I have an inkling, but I would lose $32,000, and I don't think an inkling is enough to risk that," I heard myself say. "I think I'm going to stop." Regis, as is his sadistic custom, asked me what I would have guessed. I told him High Noon. He told me I would have won $125,000.
Gilovich has conducted studies into "counterfactual thinking," better known as the "what if?" phenomenon. It's the same cognitive process that plagues the silver medallist who loses by a hundredth of a second or the person who's one minute late for a flight. Mine is a textbook example. "Your reaction to anything is determined by not only what happened, but by what almost happened," says Gilovich. "You're comparing what you got to what you could so easily imagine getting. You kick yourself for not following your instincts because you can come up with a counterfactual scenario that has you rich." I have since stopped berating myself constantly; I'm down to kicking myself only a few times a day.
As I walked off the "Millionaire" set with an oversized cardboard check, I had no idea that my fifteen minutes of fame would go into overtime. You see, after every commercial break, Regis asks the contestant a personal question or two. We chatted about my friendship with the previous contestant, even the fact that I suffer from crimnophobia (the fear of precipices). Finally, after I had won the $64,000, Regis said, "So you've written a few books. What's the latest one?"
So I told him. Four years ago, my wife (Amy Hillsberg Herzog '91) and I liquidated our assets, bought a thirty-four-foot Winnebago, and hit the road. We traveled through forty-eight states and covered some 35,000 miles, searching for virtues in modern America by visiting such towns as Pride (Alabama), Wisdom (Montana), and Inspiration (Arizona). "If you can't take the trip," Regis told 50 million people, "you might as well buy the book, States of Mind, and get a look at America."
Watching with his family in Ithaca, Douglas Stayman, associate professor of marketing in the Johnson school, had a feeling this was no small plug. "A thirty-second ad on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" probably costs about $400,000," he says, "and you got much better than thirty seconds because the quality of the ad is much better. People aren't going to the bathroom. You're talking during the show, when they want to be there."
The book had received some nice reviews, but it had hardly been flying off the shelves. Before "Millionaire" aired, I logged on to amazon.com and checked the latest sales rank, which is updated hourly. It was the 122,040th best-selling book. Two hours after the show appeared on the West Coast, I checked again. It was at Number 50. The next morning, it was Number 18. By that evening, it was Number 7. USA Today ran a blurb detailing the book's rise up the charts. Entertainment Weekly called, followed by the New York Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. After I flew back to New York and did five minutes with Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today Show," States of Mind rose to Number 2, behind an unpublished Harry Potter book. The book went into a second printing, the paperback rights were sold, and Hollywood production companies inquired.
It was a case study on the power of publicity, the consumer herd mentality, and the very notion that thirteen-hundredths of a second (my Fastest Finger margin) could change my life. And of course, the reach of a simple game show. "Why does that show work? Because you empathize with the contestant," says Stayman. "You're sort of rooting for the person. They were rooting for you."
And to think all I wanted was to win a million bucks.
Brad Herzog '90 is a frequent contributor to Cornell Magazine.
Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.
BY BRAD HERZOG
How thirteen one-hundredths of a second
made for fifteen minutes of fame,
plus a little fortune
For a while last spring--okay, forty minutes of prime time--I was Kato Kaelin, the person who shot J.R., and that rainbow-wigged sports fan with the "John 3:16" sign all rolled into one. Because on April 4, a massive ABC television audience tuned in to find out "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" And the answer was . . . me.
It was an exhilarating, intoxicating, silly, surreal experience. And after hearing Regis Philbin offer up what has become the catch-phrase of the millennium--"Is that your final answer?"--all I can think of are questions.
For $100: The hypothetical evolutionary gap between ape and man is most commonly called:
A. Missing Link
B. Gap Man
C. Evolutionary Eddie
D. Dad
I've evolved into this: a lazy, inhibited cynic. I'm certainly not the game-show type. But "Millionaire" offers big ratings (TV's highest, three times a week) and big bucks (like the name says). The premise is simple: a contestant has a shot at fifteen questions, each progressively harder and more lucrative. Answer them all correctly, win a million bucks. The appeal may seem obvious. But why would someone like me, who avoids fads like the plague, suddenly decide to become the television equivalent of the keynote speaker at a Beanie Baby convention?
Luckily, Robert Frank knows a lot about the pursuit of wealth. The Goldwin Smith professor of economics, ethics, and public policy at Cornell, Frank is the author of Luxury Fever, on America's obsession with big spending. In 1995, he says, there were 190,000 people in the U.S. worth $10 million or more; by 1998 there were 275,000. "The number of people with a lot of money has just been exploding lately," he says, "and what they do with it is very much on display." His take on the "Millionaire" phenomenon: the rise of the dot-com economy has made people more obsessed with quick riches. "There's a lot of easy money out there. Until a few months ago, if you told a plausible story about an e-commerce venture, people would rain money on you. A lot of people saw this and wondered, 'Why not me?'"
Indeed, the numbers are astonishing. Some 240,000 people a day dial the show's 800 number for the first round of qualification. Being self-employed, I dialed once a day (the limit) for about a month. When I finally got through, an automated voice asked three questions ("Put these celebrities in chronological order of their date of birth: Spalding Gray, Seth Green, Bobby Brown, Redd Foxx"). I had ten seconds to answer each correctly by pushing the buttons. More often than not, I failed. About 98 percent of callers do.
Six times, however, I succeeded, and my name was thrown into a pool with the other 5,000 or so first-round qualifiers. The next morning, I awaited a random phone call put through to just forty of those 5,000. Five times, it never came. Then the phone rang. It was a real person, telling me to call a certain number at a certain hour on a certain day to answer five more questions. If I was among the ten people to answer all five correctly in the fastest time, I'd be on the show.
The subjects of that trivia test ranged from the Teapot Dome Scandal to Mary Lou Retton. Finally, there was this synapse-snapper: "Put the following ancient civilizations in the order in which they were established: Assyrian, Classical Greek, Mayan, Sumerian." I didn't have time to say, "What, are you kidding?" I just pushed a few buttons and hung up. Ninety minutes later, I distinctly remember two ringing sounds. One was the phone, with a producer telling me they'd be flying me and my wife to New York. The other was a cash register in my head.
For $500: Which comedian became the spokesperson for Jell-O pudding in 1974?
A. Bill Cosby
B. Steve Martin
C. Billy Crystal
D. Robert Klein
I couldn't eat a thing. Having flown from California to New York, and having slept not at all, I arrived with the other nine contestants at the ABC studios at 7:30 the next morning. Our show didn't begin taping until about 5 p.m. In between, they fed us three meals, and I managed to nibble at a slice of bread.
The hours leading up to The Hour are designed to make the ten contestants feel as comfortable as possible. Each has a producer who conducts a comprehensive interview followed by an informational speech by the show's attorney and an inspirational talk by its executive producer. Taking precautions not to repeat the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" goes so far as to require a producer to accompany contestants to the bathroom.
Eventually, they let us practice. For those who haven't seen the show (have you heard Al Gore is running for President?), the ten contestants vie for a spot in the "hot seat," the chair across from Sir Regis himself. To get there, you have to finish first in the Fastest Finger round, in which the questions are of the put-these-four-things-in-order variety. Five times that morning we were served up practice queries which were much easier than the usual fare. Five times I went down in flames.
I was in a panic all day. My hands shook. My knees wobbled. I paced like an expectant father. Bruce Levitt, a professor in Cornell's Department of Theater, Dance, and Film, says this is normal--such anxiety may actually be beneficial. "All actors or performers usually have some kind of nervousness," he says. "Some people feel that if they get nervous before a performance, there's an energy boost and it heightens their concentration."
He may be right. After failing miserably in five practice rounds, the moment of truth finally arrived: "Put these female characters in order of when they first appeared on TV: Claire Huxtable, Marge Simpson, Edith Bunker, Ellie Ewing." And I nailed it. I answered in 4.96 seconds, exactly thirteen-hundredths of a second faster than the only other contestant who came close.
For $1,000: According to the popular 1963 song, "Puff the Magic Dragon lives by the sea" in which town?
A. Honah-Lee
B. Monterey
C. Honolulu
D. Gallipoli
I live less than a mile from Monterey, California; a few years ago, I wrote an article about the song, whose lyrics were penned at Cornell by Peter Yarrow '59. I never mentioned this to Regis, but we did discuss my article about Dr. Joyce Brothers '47, who parlayed her triumph on "The $64,000 Question" into a long and lucrative career. "If I can match her," I told him, "I'd be very happy."
I don't believe in destiny or ghosts or karma. But you see . . . I have this friend, Julie. We rang in the millennium together. My mother-in-law was her sixth grade teacher. Her husband was my twin brother's college roommate. At the time I taped "Millionaire," only about 175 people had made it into the "hot seat." Yet the person in that chair immediately before me--a woman who was still in the midst of her questions from the previous taping and thus carried over onto my show--was Julie.
It's the kind of thing that begs scientific explanation. Who better to ask than Steven Strogatz, a professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, who gained some fame of his own for his mathematical exploration of the small-world phenomenon in social networks (popularly known as "six degrees of separation")?
When I suggested that the odds of two friends sharing the hot seat must be one in a million, Strogatz--who has been calling daily to try out for the show himself--said this: Sociologists have estimated that each of us knows no more than one thousand people on a first-name basis. There are some 275 million people in the United States, so the chances of a randomly chosen American being an acquaintance is about one in 275,000. "I don't see any clear way to calculate this number," says Strogatz. "My prejudice is that these things usually aren't that surprising. Our intuition is lousy as far as what we should expect. What we often call coincidence is actually statistically highly probable." Then he thinks about it for a while and calls me back. "I'm starting to come around to the idea that this is a pretty amazing coincidence," he says, perhaps something on the order of one in 10,000.
For $8,000: Since 1949, which of these images has been a part of the logo for Hallmark cards?
A. Heart
B. Star
C. Crown
D. Key
There is a Hallmark "Gold Crown" store twelve blocks from my house. I've walked past it a hundred times. I didn't think of it once. There was a vague crown-like image somewhere in the recesses of my mind, but I couldn't retrieve it with full confidence. According to psychology professor Ulric Neisser, one basic explanation is that, well, it was never really integrated into my brain in the first place. "When it comes to remembering things and verbalizing them," says Neisser, "you can do it better with things you've actually talked about." Furthermore, he says, the very kind of concentration Levitt was talking about can actually work against you when it comes to answering trivia questions. "You get rattled, and when you're excited the adrenaline is pumping," he says. "That tends to narrow your field of attention. It's a good strategy in some situations, like when you're fighting for your life. But if you're trying to retrieve a lot of things that are randomly stored, you're a lot less likely to remember them."
They say 29 million households were watching. That's a larger audience than the Beatles's first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, nearly Super Bowl numbers. It's more than the entire population of Canada. On top of it all, the music and lighting are designed to increase tension. "There is a difference between tension, which is healthy on stage, and tenseness, which is not healthy," says Levitt. "My suspicion is that some people on that show experience tenseness, as opposed to tension, because there's so much stimulation and so many things going through your mind that it's difficult to come down to a simple point of concentration."
Difficult? The best I remember, the following are some of the thoughts that were careening around my brain: "I can't believe this is happening . . . There must be 50 million people watching me . . . Am I thinking clearly? . . . I wish I could exchange glances with my wife . . . Why do I keep touching my nose? . . . That Regis sure has some white teeth . . ." You get the picture. It's like trying to defend an honors thesis while juggling chainsaws. Or, as Neisser puts it: "You start thinking about how badly you think you're doing, and a whole lot of self-critical thoughts start circulating."
Now I have to admit something embarrassing. I studied for the show. I studied hard. How can one possibly study . . . everything? Well, I tried. In the week I had to prepare, I read almanacs and encyclopedias, combed through the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and scrutinized the Concise World Atlas. I learned the names of the Three Musketeers, six inert gases, seven Ancient Wonders of the World, and Twelve Apostles.
So what do I get? My $2,000 question was: "Who invented the cotton gin?" Does anybody really know what a cotton gin does? No. But from about the fifth grade on, everyone knows Eli Whitney invented the darn thing.
But I was stuck on this Hallmark question. Had I been sitting on my couch at home and shouting answers into a vacuum, I would have gone with my instincts. Instead, I chose to use a lifeline. You get three lifelines on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" It's the jewel in the show's design. You can poll the 187 members of the studio audience. You can opt for the "50-50," which removes two incorrect answers. Or you can phone a friend.
I had polled the audience on the $4,000 question, regarding the name of the comic strip character Dilbert's pet dog. I knew the answer was Dogbert. I even said so. But I wasn't positive, so I asked the audience and they confirmed it. I had wasted a lifeline. Now, I was pretty sure of the answer again, but I used the "50-50" option, which left "heart" and "crown." With the former beating 120 times a minute, I chose the latter.
Looking back, I rationalize that I was playing it safe. However, Levitt puts a different spin on it. Anxiety is heightened by added pressures, he explains, pressures like time, money, and "an element of very public humiliation."
He may be right. I may have been playing not to lose. And I had one lifeline left.
For $32,000: Which band holds the record for the highest-grossing North American concert tour?
A. U2
B. The Eagles
C. Pink Floyd
D. The Rolling Stones
"That's a tough question," I smiled. I wasn't smiling on the inside. Once you reach the $32,000 plateau, you get to keep at least that. Before that level, an incorrect answer drops you back to $1,000. It's the clever catch of the game. Risk vs. reward. Courage vs. conservatism. Sure, I would have loved to have won the million, but thirty-two grand was my more realistic goal. So I was about to use my final lifeline to get there. But oh, did I have options.
Each contestant is told to come equipped with phone numbers for five people who serve as phone-a-friends. Generally, people opt for a father-in-law or a colleague or an old tenth-grade English teacher. But why leave anything to chance? I assembled a Dream Team of lifelines, each of whom agreed to sit patiently for hours waiting for a phone call that would likely never come.
One was a mystery writer who's well-versed in subjects from "Star Trek" to Shakespeare. Another was a former neighbor who's a radiologist and the kind of guy who runs the table in Trivial Pursuit. The other three? I had never met them in my life. They were a friend of friend, a cousin of a friend, even a friend of a cousin of a friend.
Charles is a teacher in San Francisco, a PhD in history who plays four musical instruments, has lived in several foreign countries, and was once a contestant on "Jeopardy." Danny is a Harvard undergrad, twice a runner-up in the Massachusetts Geography Bee. The final Dream Teamer was Ben, an editor at the New Yorker whose resume includes stints as a movie critic, music critic, and grad student in literature. The guy once competed in the National Rock 'n Roll Trivia Bowl, for crying out loud. If he didn't know this . . .
"You understand," Regis kidded Ben, "the reputation of the New Yorker is on the line."
Silence. "All right, we'll see . . ."
I had thirty seconds to tell Ben the question and answers and get a reply.
"I'm not 100 percent positive," he said, "but I would guess that it would be the Rolling Stones. Let me just . . ."
Click. Time was up.
After a minute of hemming and hawing, I went with Ben's choice and
. . . he was right. A few minutes later--when I decided that the crossword puzzle (not horoscopes, weather predictions, or wedding announcements) debuted in the New York World in 1913--I won $64,000.
For $125,000: Which of these American westerns was not a remake of a Japanese film?
A. The Magnificent Seven
B. The Outrage
C. High Noon
D. A Fistful of Dollars
"I'm pretty sure The Magnificent Seven was a remake," I said. "The other three, I'm not sure."
Three things could happen: I could answer correctly (figuring I had about a one in three chance of doing so) and make another $61,000. I could answer incorrectly and lose $32,000. Or I could decide not to answer at all, keeping the $64,000. Only after the fact does psychology professor and statistics guru Tom Gilovich reveal the math behind my decision. "If you think there really is a one-in-three chance of winning, you multiply .33 by the possible winnings, in this case $61,000. And multiply .67 by what you would lose. You add those two together and see whether it's a positive or a negative number," he explains.
Let's see, that's $20,130 on the plus side and $21,440 on the minus side. Close enough to be a coin flip, right? "That's if all you're considering is that round," says Gilovich. "But of course all you could lose is the $32,000, and you could conceivably win a lot more by continuing the game."
Translation: It's probably worth the risk. I had been telling people that, should I be confronted with this exact scenario, I'd take a stab at it. To friends who've seen me stay too long at a blackjack table, this would come as no surprise. Of course, that strategy was crafted from the comfort of my living room. But with real money on the line? "I have an inkling, but I would lose $32,000, and I don't think an inkling is enough to risk that," I heard myself say. "I think I'm going to stop." Regis, as is his sadistic custom, asked me what I would have guessed. I told him High Noon. He told me I would have won $125,000.
Gilovich has conducted studies into "counterfactual thinking," better known as the "what if?" phenomenon. It's the same cognitive process that plagues the silver medallist who loses by a hundredth of a second or the person who's one minute late for a flight. Mine is a textbook example. "Your reaction to anything is determined by not only what happened, but by what almost happened," says Gilovich. "You're comparing what you got to what you could so easily imagine getting. You kick yourself for not following your instincts because you can come up with a counterfactual scenario that has you rich." I have since stopped berating myself constantly; I'm down to kicking myself only a few times a day.
As I walked off the "Millionaire" set with an oversized cardboard check, I had no idea that my fifteen minutes of fame would go into overtime. You see, after every commercial break, Regis asks the contestant a personal question or two. We chatted about my friendship with the previous contestant, even the fact that I suffer from crimnophobia (the fear of precipices). Finally, after I had won the $64,000, Regis said, "So you've written a few books. What's the latest one?"
So I told him. Four years ago, my wife (Amy Hillsberg Herzog '91) and I liquidated our assets, bought a thirty-four-foot Winnebago, and hit the road. We traveled through forty-eight states and covered some 35,000 miles, searching for virtues in modern America by visiting such towns as Pride (Alabama), Wisdom (Montana), and Inspiration (Arizona). "If you can't take the trip," Regis told 50 million people, "you might as well buy the book, States of Mind, and get a look at America."
Watching with his family in Ithaca, Douglas Stayman, associate professor of marketing in the Johnson school, had a feeling this was no small plug. "A thirty-second ad on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" probably costs about $400,000," he says, "and you got much better than thirty seconds because the quality of the ad is much better. People aren't going to the bathroom. You're talking during the show, when they want to be there."
The book had received some nice reviews, but it had hardly been flying off the shelves. Before "Millionaire" aired, I logged on to amazon.com and checked the latest sales rank, which is updated hourly. It was the 122,040th best-selling book. Two hours after the show appeared on the West Coast, I checked again. It was at Number 50. The next morning, it was Number 18. By that evening, it was Number 7. USA Today ran a blurb detailing the book's rise up the charts. Entertainment Weekly called, followed by the New York Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. After I flew back to New York and did five minutes with Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today Show," States of Mind rose to Number 2, behind an unpublished Harry Potter book. The book went into a second printing, the paperback rights were sold, and Hollywood production companies inquired.
It was a case study on the power of publicity, the consumer herd mentality, and the very notion that thirteen-hundredths of a second (my Fastest Finger margin) could change my life. And of course, the reach of a simple game show. "Why does that show work? Because you empathize with the contestant," says Stayman. "You're sort of rooting for the person. They were rooting for you."
And to think all I wanted was to win a million bucks.
Brad Herzog '90 is a frequent contributor to Cornell Magazine.
Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.