Back in 2000, Bowen Karens found himself sitting in the hot seat on the game show

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

At the time, he was a 24-year-old math teacher, earning around $45,000 a year.

And as the lights dimmed and the intense music echoed through the studio,

he tried to mentally prepare for a series of 15 trivia questions

that could change his life.

Let's play who wants to be a billionaire.

Here we go.

For $100, which of the following vehicles has no wheels?

It really is like you think it is.

All around you in every direction, it's a theater in the round thing,

and there's the music, and there's cameras.

It's a strange, surreal experience filled with adrenaline and fear.

My motivation was to try and clear my head of everything

except the fact that there's a multiple choice question sitting in front of me.

What Karens didn't know at the time is that the show was carefully designed to anticipate

exactly how he would react to all of those stimuli.

Because in the world of game shows, little is left to chance.

Behind the scenes, producers have simulated the gameplay thousands of times.

At every juncture, they know the odds that a typical contestant will get the next question right.

And they've carefully baked all of the risk into their budget.

You want it to be a struggle for someone to win a million dollars because otherwise it's not interesting.

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