The Price Is Right's Perfect Bid - Game Shows Part V

00:02This is World's Greatest Con. I'm Brian Brushwood.

00:10What makes people lie?

00:13Why would any of us willingly deceive somebody?

00:17Do we do it for panic, greed, sometimes, sure, but not every lie has a clean-cut motivation.

00:26Sometimes, things are messier, so let's ask another question.

00:30What is a lie?

00:32A lot of people think it's saying the opposite of the truth.

00:36I have a hand behind my back, and I have three fingers held out, and I tell you I have anything other than three, then I'm lying, but am I lying?

00:46Maybe I am, or maybe I legitimately meant to put up another number and accidentally put up three, or maybe I got confused with another number and misspoke.

00:58Would that be a lie?

01:01We spend a lot of time in our modern culture talking about truth and facts, but the reality is that these things are far more complicated than a cable news chyron would lead you to Think about the stories we've told so far in this season.

01:17Do you think Dan Enright has a different version of the story of 21 than we told?

01:23Of course he does, and I bet you'd hear a lot more complicated version of the story from Michael Larson when we talk about the Press Your Luck scandal, Carrie Ketchum on Super Password, the Ingram gang from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

01:36All of them are going to have stories different from the ones we've told.

01:41Now, we've done our due diligence on all of these stories and even tried to represent the points of view of these guys, but if they told you something different, against all the evidence that we could find, would that make them liars? Let's flip it.

01:58If you believe them, would it make me the liar?

02:02The reality is that the truth of these stories will always be an amalgamation of perspectives, bolstered with whatever physical evidence can back it up.

02:13A lie is simply the one you don't believe, and the truth is the one you settle on.

02:20Some situations are more complicated than others.

02:24For example, what if you had three people each tell the same story in their own words?

02:33And what if none of the three versions matched?

02:38On September 22nd, 2008, in Television City Studios, a game show taped just like it had for over three decades.

02:47It's an explosion of American populism, a ray of televised sunshine with a cradle-to-grave audience that is still on the air in the same time slot today.

02:58In fact, I bet you can even guess it, or at least get closest without going over.

03:04The ears of our great nation are about to hear Angela Fuentes! Come on down!

03:11You're the next contestant on The Price is Right.

03:16The Price is Right.

03:18On September 22nd, something very, very special happens at the very end of the show.

03:24What did he bid for all that?

03:28It would have been an 18-foot trailer, she might have bid on it.

03:31But it was only a 17-foot trailer. $23,743.

03:33That's Terry Neese, and he just made a very specific bid on the final showcase showdown.

03:38A very exact bid. Good luck.

03:40And for the first time in the history of the daytime version of this legendary show, he is exactly right, down to the final dollar.

03:50Price is Right, which is famously filmed live-to-tape in order to avoid any kind of editing, they commercial, and they don't restart production for another 10 minutes.

04:01Or was it 45 minutes?

04:03Or is it 25 minutes?

04:06That depends who you ask.

04:08And that's just the beginning of the inconsistencies.

04:12What the staff of The Price is Right believes is that they just got robbed.

04:18A longtime producer who had just been fired was getting his revenge.

04:22Did he organize this?

04:23Maybe somebody sympathetic to him?

04:25Did they tip off the contestant?

04:27Hell, maybe somebody tipped off one of the superfans in the crowds.

04:32One of those superfans is sitting right next to the man who made the perfect bid.

04:37This fan has been to the show over 30 times.

04:40But from the superfan's perspective, he wouldn't need to be tipped off.

04:45He's an obsessive person about this stuff.

04:48He knows all of the prices by heart.

04:51He claims he added up everything in his head all by himself and that he was the one that shouted out the answer.

04:58But neither the fired producer nor the superfan won any money.

05:01That would be the man who made the perfect bid. A former weatherman.

05:07Also a former Las Vegas casino security official who eventually learns how to count cards.

05:14He has no idea this backstage drama is even happening.

05:18He doesn't know anything about the deposed producer.

05:21He says he barely even knows the superfan outside of some idle chatter while they were waiting in line together.

05:27And he most certainly didn't need any help on that perfect bid.

05:31He says the exact five digit number popped into his head like magic.

05:35He's just that lucky.

05:37Or maybe it wasn't any one of these three people.

05:41Maybe it's a combination of everyone.

05:43Maybe a hostile work environment backstage, a ringer in the crowd, and a man who recognizes where the wind is blowing worked together to make this happen.

05:52What we know for sure is that there is a lot of coverage about this story from all the first person perspectives of everybody around it.

06:01Podcast interviews, feature articles, autobiographies, documentaries, all of them about one relatively minor moment in game show history.

06:10And none of them agree entirely on the facts.

06:14We're about to hear from a lot of people.

06:18Our job is to find out who's lying, why are they lying, and if they even believe they're lying at all.

06:26Cons don't fool us because we're stupid.

06:30They fool us because we're human.

06:33It's a genuine whodunit for our season finale of the world's greatest con.

08:17The Price is Right, the exciting game of bidding, buying, and bargaining with your host, Bill Sullivan.

08:47The Price is Right first aired on TV as Contemporary to 21 back in 1956.

08:54It goes off the air with the rest of the genre after the scandals, but is eventually rebooted as a morning game show in 1972.

09:02This version is hosted, as it would be for the next 35 years, by the legend Bob Barker.

09:09Barker is a natural at what they call audience participation shows.

09:15It's actually where he got his start.

09:17He hosted radio programs paid for by the electric company and would give away electric appliances.

09:23His gift throughout his whole career was with people.

09:26How to connect with them, how to talk to them, how to get them excited.

09:31Well, you didn't miss a thing.

09:33Because you're not going to look in our audience for a man.

09:36You're going out and look on the streets of Hollywood.

09:40The Price is Right was then and is now all about the people.

09:45This ain't no show for eggheads who memorized a bunch of library books.

09:50This is for workaday families.

09:52The moms who clipped coupons, the dads who balanced the family checkbooks.

09:57The best players on The Price is Right have vanishingly little strategy to memorize.

10:02But instead, they're just rewarded for simply knowing what things cost.

10:07In other words, living a normal life.

10:10The show's gone through many iterations, but the version we're talking about is one where there are three phases repeated twice throughout the show. $1,300, Bob.

10:20$1,300 for Brian. Look for Jose. $999. $999.

10:24Starts with a very simple game. One bid.

10:27Regular Joes are called out of the audience.

10:33They're put on contestant row.

10:35Together, they all see the same product.

10:38Sometimes big, sometimes small.

10:39They all put in one bid and the closest without going over wins a chance to move on to the next round.

10:47Next round, the pricing game.

10:49We're going to play Plinko for a chance to win up to $1,000,000.

10:54This is where all the fun stuff happens.

10:57Cliffhanger, Plinko, games like any number.

11:00All of these mini games have wacky concepts and all of them feature a litany of bigger prizes that rely on players knowing their worth.

11:10Anyone who makes it to a pricing game, whether they win or lose, has a chance to spin the big wheel.

11:16Here comes $25, $95, $15, $80.

11:19You're going to the showcase.

11:22Speedo's going to the showcase.

11:24And get a chance to advance to the big show, the showcase showdown.

11:29This is where two players are faced with an even greater array of prizes.

11:34Laid out in front of each of them, the two contestants vie to guess what the grand total is.

11:41The closest without going over wins.

11:43And if you guess close enough, you win both.

11:49Many of these games, the methods by which they're developed, the contours and flavor of the show, they were all the product of one man, Roger Dobkowitz.

12:11And of course, I wasn't there.

12:17So I can't, I don't really know what happened backstage.

12:25Let's just say the contestant, let's just say the contestant did cheat.

12:28Let's say the contestant had a piece of paper in front of him with the price on it that somebody slipped him during the show.

12:35What were they going to do?

12:36Were they going to, if they found that out, were they going to disqualify him and kick him off the show?

12:41I mean, then you have a show with only one showcase contestant.

12:43I would have just continued on.

12:44These are clips from a radio program called Stew's Show, hosted by Stew Showstack.

12:49Dobkowitz is a lifer.

12:50He graduates San Francisco State University with a degree in television.

12:55He writes his dissertation on the history of game shows.

12:59He mails the 120-page document to game show producers in New York and L. A.

13:05, gets a call back from the head of CBS Daytime, who's very impressed, and tells Dobkowitz he'd love to make him an executive at the network, but he needs some real-world experience first.

13:16So he puts in a word at legendary game show producer Mark Goodson in New York.

13:22Dobkowitz gets in his VW Bug and drives from L. A.

13:26all the way to New York City, only stopping to sleep and cook hard-boiled eggs on a hot plate.

13:33He eventually gets to the Big Apple and he wows Goodson.

13:37Goodson asks when Dobkowitz is going to fly back to California.

13:41Dobkowitz tells him, actually, I'm going to be driving back.

13:44Now even more impressed by the moxie he's got, Goodson hires him within 24 hours, telling him to drive back to L. A.

13:54because he's going to be working on the reboot of The Price is Right.

13:59And that's exactly what Dobkowitz did from 1972 until the day he was let go in July of 2008.

14:07The man behind his exit?

14:10Some 20-something executive by the name of Mike Richards. Wait, hold on.

14:18Mike Richards, that sounds familiar, right?

14:21Kind of like infamous?

14:23Heard any big Jeopardy news lately?

14:26In the most recent twist, less than two weeks after Sony Pictures Television revealed that the game show would keep Mike Richards on as executive producer, he has been let go.

14:37Initially chosen to succeed the late, great Alex Trebek as host of the long-running quiz show, Richards vowed out from that role when anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and erasist jokes that he told on a podcast in the mid-2010s resurfaced online.

14:49Over a decade before the controversy where he was briefly the success— to the great Alex Trebek on Jeopardy!

14:56Mike Richards was installed by Price's Rights Production Company, Fremantle Media, to help shepherd the transition from Bob Barker.

15:04He was actually a finalist for hosting that job, too, before the top brass settled on stand-up comic and television star Drew Carey, who, by the way, is awesome.

15:15Richards immediately begins cleaning house.

15:16He fires the longtime announcer and eventually becomes at odds with Dobkowitz.

15:21Here's what Dobkowitz said about his parting with the show a year after it happened.

15:28I felt like the proverbial man who was married to a beautiful wife for 30 years.

15:34He provides them, he provides his family with, you know, a nice house, and they raise three wonderful kids, and they go off to college, you know, they go to college, and then finally the last kid moves out of the house, and there's an empty nest.

15:52And the wife comes up to the husband and says, you know, honey, I haven't really been happy with you.

15:58I've just stayed together because of the kids, and I want a divorce.

16:02That's how I felt.

16:04And while he doesn't name Richards, subsequent interviews have made it pretty clear that he was the face of a new era at Price, a new era that didn't have room for if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it voices like Dobkowitz's.

16:17I could have still been there if I had given in to all that.

16:21But as I like to say, you know, I was the producer of the show.

16:26If I had given in to all those things and just did what they tell me to do, I would no longer have been a producer.

16:34I would have been a production assistant with a fancy title.

16:36We have a motive.

16:37Man just lost the only job he ever had.

16:39He was a personal friend to Bob Barker.

16:41His fingerprints were all over the show.

16:44So what happens when he's gone?

16:47If he really wanted revenge on the guy messing up his show, how could he stir the pot?

16:54Okay, let's get in the weeds a little here.

16:58Price is Right has a fixed prize budget.

17:02Since the show pays out-of-pocket for prizes, they have to stay under that budget.

17:08That means if the contestants go on a run winning car after car after car, the show needs to balance the scales.

17:16They do this by putting in some of the games with a lower win rate.

17:21Dobkowitz himself said the year before he was let go, he had to make up for a $400,000 shortfall in the budget.

17:29So what if, knowing all that, he really, really wanted to screw over the new guy?

17:35The day of the perfect bid, Price is Right was taking an absolute beating.

17:40One contestant had already won a car.

17:44Another won $2,000 cash.

17:46Then our eventual big winner Terry gets a perfect bid on a big green egg smoker before the improbable finale.

17:54This is why the show stopped for 45 minutes before the big reveal.

17:59The behind-the-scenes crew is convinced something is wrong.

18:03If there's one person with the most bad blood, it's Dobkowitz.

18:07There was a producer on the show my first year that had been there 35 years.

18:15He'd been there his whole television career.

18:17It was his first job out of college.

18:20This is Drew Carey on The Kevin Pollak Show.

18:23And then he wasn't there my second year on the show.

18:26And this fan group, they didn't blame me for him not being there, but we thought somebody from the staff was also mad about this and was cooperating with the fan group and was like, just to f*** the show over, gave the guy the price of the showcase.

18:41So we have a motive and we have the result.

18:43Something that an ex-producer would know more than anybody could hurt the production.

18:46Possibly to the point of permanently damaging the show.

18:48I think I'm f***ed.

18:49Here's Drew Carey spelling out what this might have meant.

18:53Right, you're out of a job.

18:56I think I'm out of a job.

18:58You think they're shutting down the show?

19:00I think they're shutting down the show.

19:02And this is why Carey ends the show not with a jubilant celebration of television history, but the relatively curt reveal of...

19:05You had the trailer, jukebox, you bid $23,743.

19:07Extra retail price, $23,743.

19:09You got it right on the nose.

19:12You didn't buy the showcases.

19:14But here's my problem. How?

19:16Price is Right is very random.

19:21Even if every contestant had a psychic mind meld with Dobkowitz, it still wouldn't guarantee that the right people were selected to play.

19:35Or that the corresponding games would be unveiled.

19:39Or that they'd score right on the showcase wheel.

19:43It all just feels like sour grapes from the new crew. Unless...

19:48there was a ringer in the crowd.

19:51Remember, another populist element of Price is Right is that the audience is encouraged to yell their guesses at every contestant.

20:00What if there was somebody in the crowd that knew every price of every item?

20:09What if he didn't even need inside info to pull this off?

20:13What if this guy, Theodore Slauson, is a fan?

20:17Like, a massive, obsessive fan of The Price is Right.

20:21From the colors, to the music, the prizes, the models, there's something visceral that attracts a rabid fanbase.

20:27Theodore loved it all.

20:29But he's most attracted to the math elements.

20:32So, one week, I got into, like, watching Price is Right from, like, 1973.

20:40The same refrigerator freezer is on four different episodes that I watched, and it was $789 all four times.

20:49I'm like, well, see, there it is. There's proof.

20:56It was way back in the beginning.

21:00It was the same, you know, same stuff over and over.

21:04That is a clip from The Perfect Bid, the contestant who knew too much.

21:07A 2017 documentary about all of this, but particularly centering around Theodore.

21:10He's got a natural math mind, so much so that he went on to professionally craft math problems for standardized tests.

21:19He appreciates the concept of memorization, quick arithmetic, the kind of things that dominate the show.

21:26The first time Theodore waits in line to be a contestant, he wore a shirt that read I'm Here to Kiss Holly, his favorite prize model.

21:37But mostly, Theodore knew that The Price is Right reuses prizes.

21:42Prizes that happen to retain the exact same price.

21:45He'd later code not one, but two computer programs so he could do this automatically and randomly at his leisure.

21:55Theodore got into the audience of The Price is Right over 30 times before the fateful Perfect Bid.

22:05One time he was so conspicuous screaming out the perfect answer that he was singled out by Bob Barker himself.

22:14Theodore, the actual retail price is $12. 50!

22:19Theodore's a bidder, isn't he?

22:21Eventually, Theodore makes it on stage, guesses perfectly on one bid, but has the misfortune of getting one of the most random pricing games, Punch-a-Bunch.

22:31He wins $1,000, a few prizes, and then washes out at the big showcase wheel. And that's that.

22:39After dozens of trips to get on the show, that was his one shot.

22:44On the upside, he does get a kiss from Holly.

22:48Strangely, though, completing this quest doesn't stop Theodore from continuing to attend tapings, despite the fact that, based on the rules of the game, he couldn't compete again.

23:01He would go with friends and tell them he'd help.

23:05Sometimes he'd make friends with people in line, tell these strangers that he'd help them once they get on stage.

23:13And I totally get that.

23:14When you're a fan of something, the chance to share that fandom, to be somebody's support group, it's awesome.

23:19It's important to know that nothing Theodore does is against any of the rules.

23:24In fact, the only rule on Price is Right when it comes to knowing prices is that you can't bring a physical list of prices into the studio.

23:38But who needs a list when you've got Theodore?

23:41According to him, one stranger he met in line eventually made it all the way to the final showcase.

23:47He says he shouted the exact right answer, but she didn't listen.

23:51Then the rules changed.

23:53And what was once a lifetime ban, after appearing on the show, becomes a ten-year moratorium.

23:58And so, since it's been a decade since his last appearance, Ted starts lining up again, hoping to get his shot.

24:09Which brings us back to September 22nd, 2008.

24:13Theodore is third in line for taping.

24:16Numbers four and five are Terry Neese and his wife. They sound familiar?

24:21Being early in line means, yes, you have plenty of time to quiz each other on prices.

24:30But it also means that you're going to sit closer to the stage.

24:38And according to Theodore, it's Terry's wife that has the greater aptitude for price recall.

24:43And here's something else that bears mentioning.

24:45At this point, we're about a year into the tenure of Drew Carey.

24:50And that has some fans really, really annoyed.

24:54Long-time fans, people who liked it the way it used to be.

24:58Fans that also knew that Roger Dobkowitz had been recently fired.

25:01Terry gets selected by the producers to play, and he makes his way to contestants row.

25:07He gets the price of the big green egg smoker exactly right.

25:12So at this point, would Theodore be, what, a mole for Dobkowitz?

25:16Like, does he have insider knowledge?

25:18I mean, it's possible, but overly complicated in my book.

25:22Why would Dobkowitz have to give Theodore the prices that he's already been guessing correctly for literally decades?

25:30I don't know about you, but I'm going to cross Dobkowitz off the suspect list.

25:39So did Theodore give Terry the perfect bid?

25:43It would make sense since Theodore has already done it before.

25:48The exact right showcase amount.

25:50That would make sense except for one little detail.

25:53Terry vehemently denies any of that happened.

25:56According to Terry, he couldn't have gotten those details from Theodore because Terry is hard of hearing.

27:51But, Terry Neese says not so fast because tomorrow morning rush hour might be a little shaky. A little dicey.

27:59We will have some fog in the morning to contend with, but after the fog clears out, we are in store for some sunshine.

28:19You'll want to keep that in mind.

28:21The fog, you might want to add a little extra time to your driving tomorrow morning.

28:25Let's check the current conditions as we take a trip over to Peachtree this evening.

28:28Right now, we do have cloudy skies.

28:30The temperature, 46 degrees.

28:31That's Terry back when he was the weatherman for WGNX in Atlanta, Georgia.

28:34He had a distinguished career starting in Springfield, Missouri and ending up in Las Vegas, Nevada.

28:38But, he really found his groove while he was in the Peach State, earning himself multiple News Emmys during his time there.

28:45According to Terry, that's where he found himself trapped.

28:48He didn't love living in Atlanta.

28:50The way TV news works, the only promotions you're going to get from there would be to places he would like even less, like Chicago or New York. So, he quit.

29:01He and his wife moved back to Las Vegas.

29:04Terry knows systems and patterns.

29:06It's a stock and trade of being a weatherman.

29:08So, he gets a job in the business that made the town in the desert famous, gambling.

29:13He finds himself working security for Circus Circus.

29:16Sits in a back room, watches monitors, looking for card counters.

29:22Patterns, that's all that matters.

29:24In the same way he could spot pressure systems that'll cause rain and cold, he could spot the men and women who sought to exploit imperfections of the dealers.

29:36Watch the tables they sat at, the seats they chose, the way they bid.

29:42He got pretty good at picking them out, too.

29:44So much so, that he got a little bit curious.

29:47I mean, if identifying a card counter was easy, how hard would it be to, you know, count cards? So he does.

29:57And he gets good at that, too.

30:00Here's the weird thing about counting cards at Blackjack.

30:03It's not against the rules.

30:06And there's some number of casinos that really want you to try.

30:10Because being bad at counting cards is good for the casino.

30:15But if you're good at counting cards, you might get a tap on the shoulder and a gentle request that perhaps your style of play isn't a match for their casino.

30:28AKA, you just got busted. You're now banned.

30:32Terry used to be the guy to spot the counters and have them banned.

30:37Now he is a counter.

30:39And he is banned.

30:40It's at this point that Terry and his wife find a new obsession.

30:47The price is right.

30:49Like many other fans, they figure out that the prizes are recycled.

30:54And they start keeping track.

30:55They quiz each other.

30:56Eventually, they make the drive all the way down to Burbank to play the big game themselves.

31:03Which brings us back to September 22nd.

31:06Somebody got the price right on the nose and wins an extra $500 cash right here.

31:12I don't even know who it is. I can't imagine.

31:14The person that got the price right on the nose is the one that bid $1,175. Terry.

31:25Terry gets the perfect bid on the big green egg, but bombs out on the pricing game Switch.

31:35According to him, it's because he didn't realize there were two bikes and was confused on exactly how expensive a terabyte of memory would cost.

31:50Some people believe that the reason why is that the stage for Switch was very far from where his wife and Theodore were sitting.

31:58Still, Terry locks out, gets the highest score on the wheel, puts him in the final showcase.

32:04So, if Terry, the weatherman turned card counter, detective turned card counter, didn't get the numbers from Theodore, where did they come from?

32:14Because they're very specific numbers.

32:17The first showcase was a karaoke machine, a pool table, and a travel trailer.

32:22She passed it and it was my bid.

32:26I thought Rich Field said it was a 19-foot camper, so I applied a little more than 1,000 per foot rule, plus 3,000 for the pool table and 1,000 for the karaoke machine, putting me in the neighborhood of 23,000.

32:45Even Sharon must have been confused on the length of the camper because she asked how big it was before passing the showcase to me.

32:53Now, my mental figure of 23,000 wasn't making me feel very confident, so I looked at Linda sitting in the audience.

33:01She held up two fingers, then three fingers, and I knew I was close.

33:06When Drew asked me for my bid, I said 23,743.

33:10It rolled out off my tongue like gum from a gumball machine.

33:14That's from Terry's self-authored book about his entire situation, Cause and Effects.

33:18Unfortunately, there's no audiobook, so we had to make our own version.

33:22According to Terry, they were pretty much random.

33:26He knew the collection of prizes would add up to about $23,000, but didn't know the last three digits, so he went with numbers he didn't know.

33:41A number he and his wife knew by heart because it was a PIN code they'd use for various purposes. 7-4-3.

33:47Stunned, numb, and carrying a cue card along with other paperwork, we were walking toward the Fairfax Avenue exit of the CBS studios when Linda said, You know you just gave out our security code on national television, you dumbass.

34:01My response was a simplistic, naive, and generally stupid, Huh?

34:05Nobody will ever figure that out.

34:08We were married on the 7th of April, 7th day, 4th month, i. e. 7-4.

34:15Linda was born in March, the third month of the year, thus 7-4-3.

34:20A patterned savant who spent hours quizzing himself on prizes just randomly pulled three numbers out of a hat, and they randomly wound up being the exact three numbers that completed the only perfect bid in Price is Right history.

34:39Ever since the show aired and the allegations flew, every now and then I wished she'd been born in February and I would have been a dollar off.

34:51Alright, now some of you might have your spider senses tingling on this.

34:55We're going to interrogate Terry's logic here.

34:58You could be forgiven if at this moment you believe he's lying.

35:02He's lying that he came up with 23,000 all by himself.

35:06He's lying that he came up with 7-4-3 randomly.

35:09After all, who has a three-digit PIN code?

35:12Like what thing on earth requires a three-digit PIN code?

35:15Not a phone, not a home security system, not any computer that has a keyboard, maybe a briefcase.

35:21But beyond that, for the life of me, I can't think of any system or any device that requires a three-digit code to open.

35:31And if you want to remember a code with a date you'll never forget, like your wedding anniversary, wouldn't you just list it the way you say it?

35:42April 7th or 4-7?

35:45Now if Terry was from London, he might say 7 April like they do over there, but he's not British, he's from Pennsylvania.

35:50Also, why would you use only your wife's birth month?

35:53Maybe her birthday would complete a four-digit code?

35:57Oh wait, that would be weird because the way the first date is listed, you'd put the day before the month.

36:05Now, it's easy to get cynical, it's easy to pick through things, but let's really steel man this argument.

36:12I mean, passwords are very personal and idiosyncratic.

36:15In fact, the weirder you formulate your password could make it more secure.

36:20Yeah, sure, maybe it's just a little weird.

36:23Just seems like a long way to go when there's a much more likely solution, which is that Terry simply refuses to admit that Theodore gave him the answer.

36:33So let's ask the question we started with again.

36:36What makes people lie?

36:38Okay, so even if you don't believe Terry, it's possible, if not likely, that this is his truth.

36:44He's not lying, he's just wrong.

36:46We could search for motivations.

36:48Maybe in that moment he was spooked by standards and practices, which immediately grilled him after he won.

36:56Maybe he didn't want to share any of the spotlight with Theodore.

37:02And once you say something, it's hard to take it back.

37:07Maybe the entire situation is so chaotic that the only recollection he has is what he pieced together after the fact.

37:16In fact, here he is in his own words, talking about what the moments after the show were like.

37:23Behind CBS Studios is the Hollywood Farmer's Market, which has some really nice restaurants.

37:27I should mention by this time we were both numb from all the weirdness, in addition to feeling slightly more than a little hungry.

37:35We walked to the Italian restaurant and sat down.

37:38For the next hour, we stared at each other blankly, not saying a word.

37:43No smiles, no frowns.

37:44Just a blank kind of in-shock stare.

37:47Every now and then, without any rhyme or reason, we'd break out laughing.

37:51I'm sure everyone in the restaurant thought we were on leave from the asylum and the white coats would be there to pick us up any minute.

37:59Quite frankly, I expected the white coats too.

38:03What is a lie?

38:05Before I became a magician, I was convinced that maybe I didn't remember everything that happened in my life, but what I did remember did happen.

38:14And yet year after year on tour, as people tried to describe back to me my own stage show that they had seen only an hour beforehand, details got conflated, stories got simplified, and a narrative emerged that didn't happen to line up with what was physically possible.

38:34And we see this time and time again.

38:37One of the best-witnessed accidents in all of aviation history occurred in 1952 at the Farnborough Air Show in England.

38:45A de Havilland 110 fighter jet was in the middle of performing a supersonic maneuver, trying to thrill the crowd with a giant sonic boom.

38:56Then suddenly, without warning, the plane began to break apart.

39:01Falling debris killed 30 people and injured dozens more.

39:04They had a bit of evidence, they had the wreckage, they had photographs, but the accident itself was witnessed by 100,000 people, all of them horrified, all of them wanting to help.

39:16These aren't just any bystanders.

39:17These are aviation enthusiasts, people who know their stuff.

39:22So the authorities asked for statements from everybody, and they got a tremendous response.

39:28Eventually, researchers were able to solve the case by performing wing stress tests performed by the aircraft manufacturer.

39:35Meanwhile, those thousands of eyewitness accounts, those carefully written letters, those tedious, precise reconstructions of what these eyewitnesses saw, out of the thousands of responses from the 100,000 people who saw it live, quote, there was only one letter, which was of some use, and there were fewer than a half-dozen people who captured, to some extent, the true picture of events.

40:05Most witnesses got the split-second time sequence of disintegration backwards.

40:11They filled in bits with imagination.

40:15They preferred their theories to the factual reports.

40:20These are people who cared, who were doing their best to tell the truth as they remembered it, and I have a hard time calling them liars, especially given the work of people like Elizabeth Loftus, who ran experiments to plant false memories.

40:36One of her undergraduate students once planted a false memory in his own little brother, a five-year-old named Chris.

40:46He handed him five different stories of things that really happened and a sixth story of something that didn't happen, a story about the time he got lost at the mall and a nice old lady found him.

41:01After a little bit of rehearsal and asking for details about it, it was eventually revealed to Chris that one of these stories was fake.

41:09When Chris was asked which one is the fake story, he picked a real event that happened to him rather than believe that he never got lost at the mall when he was five.

41:18Memory is a lousy videotape, and that's just as it should be.

41:23Imagine the horror of sifting through a soup of all-accurate memories going back to the day that you were born.

41:30We collapse things, we make simple narratives, and then we reconstruct them when we need to.

41:35Is it too much to believe that in all of that hype and hubbub and the chaos and the lights that Terry would cling to one simple narrative?

41:44I don't think that makes him a liar.

41:47It might make him factually inaccurate.

41:50It might make him confused.

41:52But I don't think he's a liar.

41:54I don't think any of our characters in this story are liars.

41:58But that doesn't mean we can't piece together what we think happened.

42:02While Terry denies that he knew Theodore was a ringer and adamantly denies that he got the exact right answer from him, he does admit that he saw his wife signaling numbers to him using her fingers.

42:17Which brings us to our final, and I'll admit for my money, the most likely scenario that Terry, his wife, and Theodore are the group who works together.

42:30Theodore maintains that he has guessed the exact showcase cost not once but twice.

42:35Once to a woman who did not listen, and again to Terry and his wife.

42:41Let's go back to the exact moments before Terry makes that final bid.

42:46It would have been an 18-foot trailer.

42:49She might have bid on it.

42:51But it was only a 17-foot trailer. $23,743. $23,743.

42:59The entire room is shouting.

43:01There's a cacophony of a million voices.

43:04And meanwhile, silently, Theodore is adding up the numbers.

43:09I told Linda what it was.

43:12And I said, let me do it again.

43:16And I added it up again in my head.

43:20And I said, $23,743.

43:20Is that what I said before?

43:21And she said, yes.

43:22You can see him kind of mouthing numbers and looking at us.

43:28And he says, $23,743. Wow.

43:31Terry says he did see his wife signaling to him, but that the numbers he saw were 2 and 3. 23.

43:39This only confirmed to Terry what he already knew, that it was around $23,000. Let's pause.

43:43Because we have two stories that are very, very close. Theodore's and Terry's.

43:46This is the moment they diverge.

43:48Terry insists he only got 23 from his wife.

43:51Theodore insists he said the exact right number, not once, but twice, to the person communicating with Terry.

43:57Let's play a little game of speculation.

44:00Let's say that Terry's wife did not only signal 2 and 3.

44:06Let's assume she kept going.

44:08Let's say it was 2, 3, 7, 4, 3.

44:13That's not a hard reach, right?

44:18If that happened, then everything that follows makes total sense.

44:23Terry trusted a known number. pattern, his wife.

44:28Theodore did what he's done dozens of times, helped somebody he met in line.

44:35Furthermore, he's doing again what he says he's already done once, given the exact right answer to a final showcase showdown.

44:45Except for those final three hand signals.

44:51Those two stories are identical.

44:53So, if Theodore's story is right, why is Terry fudging?

44:58Why not come out and say it?

45:01Why not just admit you got help from a guy named Theodore?

45:05Why invent the story about the pin?

45:08Why go out of your way to show journalists your marriage certificate and your wife's passport? I'll say this.

45:17If I was in Terry's shoes, and if I wanted to have a credible story for why I pulled those numbers out of quote-unquote nowhere, I'd probably do it a lot like Terry did.

45:36In magic circles, we rely a lot on something called the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

45:40The idea is simple.

45:41Let's say you want to do a card trick where somebody picks a card, somebody else picks another card, and then you eventually find both of them.

46:00But what if by accident both people pick the exact same card?

46:04In that case, you shut your mouth and you take a bow.

46:12This is the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

46:15Instead of drawing a bullseye and then firing right in the middle, you shoot first and then decide where the target was.

46:25If I was Terry, if I was worried about being in trouble for getting answers from somebody in the audience, if I knew I was part of television history, I would be very, very tempted to construct a very airtight story.

46:44In theory, after going through all of this, I might look at all numbers and figure out what they link to in my life.

46:57I might figure out that seven and four is just a transposed version of my anniversary.

47:03Three, that happens to be the month my wife was born.

47:08Then you could pour on the social proof by saying this exact combination was in your head because it's your shared pin.

47:21Go on and on about how your wife was so mad about you giving away your secret three-digit pin code in the aftermath of the show that you simply had to change all of it.

47:32That's why none of your pins match it now.

47:35But of course, we don't know.

47:37Although I do know that I do not have a single pin code that is three digits long.

47:42All we have are the conflicting words of three potential code conspirators.

47:45And in a world without certainty, you have to be the judge.

47:49Which of these sounds the most true to you?

47:51The answer, of course, is at the heart of all the stories that we've told this season.

48:00The folks who sought to exploit the systems for fame and money, who did it with the lights turned up real bright and cameras focused right on them.

48:12Because when it comes to the world of game shows, whether you're the power player or the nobody, whether you're stealing honor or winning at and square, these are the stories that make for the World's Greatest Cons.

48:30This episode of World's Greatest Con was written by Justin Robert Young and me, Brian Brushwood, your humble host.

48:35Production and research by Dog and Pony Show Audio in Austin, Texas.

48:39Credit to Stu Show with Stu Showstack, the contestant who knew too much and cause and effects by Terry Neese, which were our firsthand points of view of the story.

48:58Also, the contestant who outsmarted the Price is Right by Chris Jones and Esquire, which along with other contemporary news articles, retrospectives and archived video made for the bulk of our research.

49:26Additional research was provided by Rachel Oppenheimer.

49:28Of course, you all have questions and we want to answer all of them at the end of the season.

49:35So get yours in right now by hitting us up at World's Greatest Con at gmail. com.

49:41In the next episode of World's Greatest Con, you stand in the spotlight.

49:45It's all about your questions and our answers.

49:48We'll see you then.

49:50Time and Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

49:53Dog and Pony Show Audio.