Most of my unseen work is consulting for various projects and areas that you might not even consider fall under the definition of a magician. Unfortunately, many of these are protected by non-disclosure agreements, preventing me from speaking openly about them. The ones that become public are but nature undisclosed (though most times not by me), and the others remain as folders in my studio, filled with papers and notes that one day will make part of a posthumous memory book.
In the absence of that day, lucky for me, a few of these projects didn’t see the light of day, rendering the signed non-disclosure agreements pointless and ineffective. One of these happened when I was approached by a TV producer interested in having me as a consultant on a game show. What type of game show would need a magician on board? You may think it was a unique approach to the format, with elements of wonder and deception. It was precisely the opposite: a network was considering a simple question-and-answer format. Their goal of having me on board was to help craft the wording of specific questions so the contestants would answer incorrectly.
Is this possible? There are a few limitations. If the contestant knew the answer, the probability of them failing would be almost an act of luck. Nevertheless, if he had to guess between the visible options without knowing the answer, there was a high conversion rate for failed answers, with some psychology mixed into the wording. Here is a straightforward example of how our brain tends to fall for deception even if you know what you have to do.
You read the above sentence, immediately focus on the numbers and colors, and try to understand what you are missing, only to realize you already missed it. The mistake is in the sentence itself, with the repetition of the proposition the. The beauty of this is that once you have seen it before, you will unlikely be fooled again. It might happen, but it’s not as easy as before. Encountering this problem for the first time and realizing the obvious answer that goes unseen has an almost magical feeling. Cherish that if this were your first time. Learn from it. Most importantly, please acknowledge that we are humans and far from perfect. Only when we accept our imperfections do we start growing.
I can’t say I was proud of accepting that job, but I would be a hypocrite if I said I didn’t enjoy its intellectual challenge. I am glad the work done did not go anywhere except my files. The reason for this was a TV scam scandal that broke in the UK, and the show's producers were afraid to pursue the line of work they wanted my help with. My involvement in the project ended. One of those occasions where one man’s mistake ended up protecting others from possibly making more mistakes than they would have. For me, the question remained: would the strategies I conceived work as well as I planned?