4. Ken Jennings: “Don’t Neglect the Thing That Makes You Weird”

23:19So it's a way I can exercise moral superiority. I can look at, ah, this guy who beat me, that guy wouldn't last on Jeopardy for 10 minutes. So it's interesting you say that because I wanted to ask you about cheating because All the stats are public. So out of the 16 ,000, roughly 16 ,000 people who are in the league, your percent correct is 160th. So you're in the 99th percentile, but just barely. But what's interesting is that there's also a component of the Learner League, which you cannot cheat, where there's a championship among the elite of the elites in which you are monitored and can't cheat.

23:55and you have finished in the top 10 the last two years. And there are other possible hypotheses, but that certainly does kind of point to the idea that there's some cheating going on. Is that your take on it as well? Yeah, as you say, there are other explanations. Many people don't deal well with the pressure of having to play under the gun. And I obviously thrive under that kind of pressure. I will often be watching myself on Jeopardy on TV and I will not know an answer. And then TV me will actually get it right, which is a weird thing about the brain. but I think you're right. I think mostly that effect is explained by people cheating.

24:30And it's so bizarre to me because they're cheating at a thing that not only has no prize, but they're cheating in an arena where the only fun thing about it is trying to think of the answer. So you have short-circuited the only source of fun in this game you are paying to play in order to look up answers. And I guess it just speaks to the fact that the need to know an answer is so compulsive that for many people, it's just irresistible. They just cannot help not knowing a thing. And I'm sympathetic to that. Like, I know this amazing sigh of well-being I get when I finally finish a crossword or whatever.

25:04To finally know an answer that was bugging you, it's incredibly satisfying. And so I get not being able to control that and then to rationalize it later and say, oh, well, yes, of course, of course. I would have got that. I would have got that. I'm not a cheater. But yes, I think in any honor system trivia, the need to know is so great that you will have a small amount of cheating and it's a bummer. So you wouldn't know, but I have my own trivia heroics. I peaked, unfortunately, at the age of 13 or 14. And I have not looked back. I have not thought about trivia for something like almost 40 years.

25:42And then my high school bowl teammate was in Learner League and he invited me in. And I really hesitantly said yes. And I found that it immediately became an obsession and it really keeps me busy. So now I can never be bored because there's always something to be learned. But the sad part is that I have a lot of knowledge. It's buried so deep because it's 40 years old that when I see those questions, I'm not exaggerating that I can think for 45 minutes about a question before I know the answer. I know I know the answer as soon as I look at it and it will take me 45 minutes. And the sad part is, I'll do it, that I actually will sit there for 45 minutes.

26:21That is not sad at all. I mean, two things. One is that we spend all our life putting things into our brain and they so seldom come in handy. It's incredibly validating to have something emerge from your mind and actually pay off in some real world sense. That's really the essential appeal of quiz games is it makes you feel like something in your brain mattered. When you mentioned that about always having something to do and something to learn, that is a great way to live. It's the best way to live, to be curious like that. But I have recently found, like, I'm retired from Jeopardy now. I'm never going to go back and play on Jeopardy again.

26:53I don't know how I can top that, and I'm not getting any better. I have the reverse experience now where it's incredibly relieving to hear someone tell me a story or tell me something in the news. And the part of my brain that in the past would have been like, ooh, I've got to file that away. Like I now have this incredibly zen feeling of, hey, it actually does not matter if I remember that story. Alex Trebek is never going to want to know that fact from me. Thank goodness. There's a difference between liking a house and actually getting it. Redfin is built to close that gap. Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents.

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28:49Okay, so let's talk about your books. And I'm not just saying this, you are an amazing writer. I think I've had a look at every one of your books, except I'd never looked at Planet Funny, your most recent one. And so this morning I thought, well, I better read at least a few pages before I go on the interview just so I can talk about it intelligently. And I was sitting around and my son was on the couch doing videos or whatever he always does. And I was laughing so loud that he's like, dad, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm just reading this book. And literally my son has not read a book in my presence in his entire life.

29:25He's 16 years old. And I handed him the book, and he starts laughing out loud and won't give me the book back. So I got to say, of all the compliments I could offer to somebody about their writing, that's roughly the greatest compliment I think it could be offered, that you won over my son. Wow. You know, I'm a huge fan of your writing as well. So that was already a great compliment, but now you've been dethroned by your 16-year-old. So you've written a book about the lies we tell our children. and I should have something better to do, but obviously I don't. I actually went through all of the ideas in that book and I tallied up your judgment of whether the things that we tell our kids are true or false.

30:03And two thirds are false and one third are true. But that surprised me because honestly, when I was growing up, I believed everything my mother said. And then when I got to be roughly college age, a couple of times it occurred to me that maybe things weren't true. And I researched what my mother said. And I shouldn't say this because she's probably listening, but literally my mother has not been right about a single thing. Maybe other people would be surprised that only a third of the things we tell our kids are true, but I was shocked that anything we tell our kids are true. You know, the data set is weird because the book kind of fact-checked just old wives' tales, but I've selected the things that kind of have surprising twists.

30:42I mean, a lot of the common sense things I tell my kids are like, don't put the fork in the toaster, and that's 100 % true. I feel like I'm pretty reliable. Don't put the fork in the toaster. It's just the things that we were repeating that we heard from our parents that we have not fact-checked and that we sometimes get wrong. And they're kind of surprising. Like, all the eye-related ones are not true. Like, you'll hurt your eyes if you wear your sister's glasses. You'll hurt your eyes if you watch TV too close or too long. All this stuff about hurting your eyes is baloney. Your eyes will bounce right back.

31:12My wife told her younger brother one time when they were camping, because he was playing music she didn't like. she told him that he had to turn his music down because it would attract mosquitoes. And she knew fully that she was lying to him. She just needed some reason for him to turn down his stereo. And she had told me that story. And the amazing thing was not, you know, a year ago, her fully grown now, you know, 35-year-old brother said completely seriously, oh, my God, we have to turn the music down. We don't want the mosquitoes to come and bite us. And I turned and we both like broke out laughing.

31:48But the power of things you learn when you're five years old, they have a power to stick with you and to rule your life if you don't have enough common sense to understand that authority figures are often lying to you for their own private benefit. I don't know if that's just a result of how plastic the brain is when you're a kid or if it's just some example of primacy effect where, you know, the first thing you hear about a topic tends to stick more than subsequent things. But that is absolutely true. And that's why parenting stuff was such a fertile field for this kind of a pop reference debunking kind of a book, because I think we do just pass along stuff we think is dangerous because we heard it once.

32:27apple seeds are dangerous don't drop a coin off a balcony that can go right through somebody's head or you know and it's it's now it's very easy to run numbers on this and uh and there is like peer-reviewed research on a lot of this stuff i think like half a dozen different universities have done work on the five second rule just because you know it's a it's a fun thing you know you'll get publicity i guess is that why that stuff gets researched you probably know better than me yeah i think a lot of people don't have much to do research wise and um the idea that you could do something that somebody would ever care about is alluring, even if the global import of it is not going to be earth-shattering.

33:05But it's astounding. There have been hundreds of studies trying to relate sugar intake with hyperactivity in children, and nobody can do it. There appears to be no relationship at all between whether your kid has had sugar and how nuts they are. And no parent will believe this, but it is apparently true. It's academically unprovable. You just happen to see your kids running around a lot at a place where they just had a birthday cake, and you think, ah, see, sugar rush. But sugar rush is not real. I find issues of correlation versus causality. The human brain is really not well equipped to separate those two, and parents are at the front of the line when it comes to confusing correlation and causality.

33:52you have a series of books for you call them the junior genius guides for smart kids and these are just incredible books because there are a lot of books written for kids that are kind of interesting but are you know kind of childish whatever but your books are first of all interesting even to adults. Like I was just reading the one about the human body, and it starts out talking about the elements in the body and how, you know, if you ground up a human body and sold it, that it would go for 160 bucks for the elements, but most of that was potassium. Everything else wasn't worth mine. You would think I was a 12-year-old.

34:32I was completely taken in by this book. And what I found interesting is it didn't seem like a book written by an adult for kids. It actually seemed like it was a book written by a kid. Have you somehow managed to stay a kid, do you think? That really is the power of trivia. It's the fun, approachable side of knowledge. It's always like, how can I present this kind of dry fact about anatomy? What's the analogy that makes this seem fun? Is there a way to turn it into a story? Is there a way to compare it? Can I change the size scale, to make the metaphor more eye-popping, all these things that you think of to make a trivial pursuit card funnier.

35:12That's exactly the kind of thing that makes the knowledge more likely to stick in the ear of a listener. And crucial to those books is the fact that you don't treat the kid like a kid. I mean, you treat the kid like a peer. And I would have always thought of it as me, an adult talking to another adult, because kids don't like to be talked down to. But maybe you're right. Maybe it's me as a kid talking to a kid as a kid. So you obviously have a very active mind, but I also get the sense that you were a very involved parent and spent a lot of time parenting. And the challenge I've always found is that in order to parent, I feel like I have to quiet my mind.

35:50I have to somehow focus on the kids instead of on the hundred other things that are racing through my mind that are in competition with that. Were you a board parent or how did you reconcile who you are with parenting? Yeah, I really see a lot of myself in that. I do have like a restless mind and kind of a compulsive mind. And I guess we've all turned into this now in the age of the cell phone, but you're absolutely right that what the child really wants and needs needs is just this unwavering attention and connection. And for me personally, the great gift of Jeopardy was my schedule was flexible.

36:28I could work around my kids. I could see them more. The way we in the West and we in the U.S. have conceived work is really the enemy of good parenting. But that's so painful. And look, I have a lot of kids. I have six kids. So obviously, I've done my best to try to accommodate them. But I was just curious because I don't think I've been very successful. I'm not a person who has gotten a tremendous amount of moment-to-moment joy out of playing fantasy games with my children. And I thought maybe you might have some kind of secret. If you've got six kids, you should be telling me the secret. I mean, you're playing the game on the highest difficulty level.

37:05I mean, in both cases, I've been lucky in that my kids were interested in things I was interested in. So we could kind of carve out what our thing was, and we would both be equally engaged in building the Lego or watching the show or going to the science museum or whatever it was. So we could definitely find a lot of places where there was parity of attention. I've always thought that one of the most important parts of parenting was knowing maybe what your hopes and dreams are for the kids. And that ends up dictating a lot of the way that you raise them. So what kind of hopes and dreams do you carry for your children?

37:44you know, that's so tricky because at first you think, you know, you kind of by default think they are your hopes and dreams. And you kind of have to let go of that and just work it back to basic principles. My core advice about raising children is you think you have control and they are absolutely who they are out of the box. If you didn't realize it with your first kid, you'll realize it if you have a second kid, because they will be raised in almost exactly the same environment apart from the older sibling and they will a hundred percent be their own people because they just came out of the tap that way.

38:16Like, you know, you realize really what you have to do is just let them be themselves and incorporate that into the culture of the family so that nobody feels like the outsider. And so like, what are the essentials of the culture of your family? You know, like your hopes and dreams for your kids might be like that they can retain a sense of humor no matter what happens, or that they treat other people with respect by default, or that they honestly say what they're feeling instead of putting up a front. You know, things like this might be better hopes and dreams than I hope my kid one day gets into Juilliard.

38:50Exactly. So I would say my main hopes and dreams for my kids are that they will be happy and that they'll be nice. Have you consciously thought about principles like that for your kids? A hundred percent. And we actually try to talk about it. You know, I tried to make it collaborative just over dinner or whatever. Like I'm Latter-day Saint. I was raised in the Mormon religion. And there's a real emphasis on just spending family time together, like carve out time on a weeknight. And that's one of the conversations that we have is like, what do you guys think is central about this family? What are the values that are most important?

39:23And like, how can we make sure we have those? And it really is always just variance on be happy, be nice. I mean, that's any religion that doesn't do that fails. You were raised Mormon, and then you made real choices for yourself about how to bring spirituality. And I think, so let me put it this way, I think it's incredibly difficult in the modern world to find one's way spiritually. So I'm wondering if you have advice for others on that topic. Yeah, give me 30 seconds. I can mop that up. I guess the core principle that I want my kids to take away, which is extremely hard in modernity, is the idea that the amazing and explicative power of science has improved our lives in a bajillion ways, but it's not very good at replacing the human need for meaning and, I guess, spirituality in a broad sense.

40:17One thing I've really found is that just the sense of certainty from not just angry internet new atheists, but just the culture in general, the kind of certainty that this kind of stuff is, it's nice, but it's optional. And actually, we do have it all figured out, and it's all a bit silly to do anything like that. It really rivals the worst kind of religious closed-mindedness that I ever saw as a kid. It's exactly what I see from people online just scoffing at any practice of religion, as if all the great thinkers who were trying to figure all this stuff out. We're dummies, but SpaghettiMonster69 on Reddit has this all figured out.

41:00And I just want my, I don't keep my kids from imbibing that. Like, I'm okay if they don't wind up believers, but I don't want them to have considered it unworthy of consideration, you know? Like, I want them to put in the time and ask the questions and to realize that the questions are important because they appear to be optional. So your kids are growing up. You've retired from Jeopardy. Where do you think you're going? What's next for you? Yeah, it really is an inflection point for me. And as I've said, not needing to be a dad that much anymore. While you're doing it, you don't realize how much of your life is being a dad and kind of keeping the room lively and being a bit of a cruise director.

41:39And, you know, being the fun dad takes some work. And so having that gone and Jeopardy! gone means I get to work more on the things that... I've kind of been spread pretty thin because I like to do everything a little bit. So the book I'm late with, which is kind of a fun travel guide to the afterlife, different versions of the afterlife from mythology and religion and TV and everything, theme park rides, comic books. that actually is finally getting finished now. I've been doing a podcast with my friend, John Roderick called Omnibus twice a week that we really enjoy because it's fun to stretch a little and having this kind of spatial memory that I do.

42:20I'm not great at narrative, which is again, not a good trait in a writer, but it's really exciting to try to work on something new and get better at something, no matter how late in your life it is. You know, maybe being on the other side of the screen. You know, people who retire as players, they're going to be coaches, they're going to be GMs, they're going to be booth teams. I don't know if there's such a thing as a professional trivia coach, but hopefully I can do stuff like that from the other side of the, and it's much easier when you have the answers in front of you. So it's a lot less stressful.

42:50Obviously someday will come when Jeopardy needs a new host. And I think that there will be a unanimous vote for who that new host should be. And that's going to be you, don't you think? no, that's very flattering. Thank you. But I get asked that a lot. And it's very troubling for me, mostly because it makes me have to think about a version of Jeopardy without Alex Trebek. And I'm not emotionally ready. Like he's so ingrained in the rhythms of the game to me, having just grown up on his voice, that really people consider him a part of their family. He's in their house for half an hour every night.

43:21I can't imagine a version of Jeopardy that is post-Alex. So I'm trying not to. Yeah, I think everyone is.

43:35All right, last question. So you seem like a person who might offer good advice. So how about on living a great life? The secret is not necessarily to follow your bliss. Like I get annoyed when I hear people who have succeeded improbably in a field tell you to follow your dreams. Because of course, Channing Tatum thinks that you can strip and act your way to success because he's like the one in 100 ,000 person who did that. And it does not follow that just because I was able to pay for a house on game show winnings that every Jeopardy fan should quit their job and train for Jeopardy. But I guess the root principle is sound, that the talents you have, the things you're good at are really sacred.

44:19Those things you really should treat as just a sacred, essential part of you. And you should not do what I did and say, computers, that seems like a good way to make a living. I'll get an engineering degree. Because it really neglected, at a very young age, a real source of joy for me. It was really antithetical to everything about myself. So if you love music, it doesn't mean you should drop out of college so you can have more time with your band. But it does mean that you should make sure music is part of your life, even if that's just singing with a community group or a church choir. Make sure that the thing you're good at is central to your life.

44:57and maybe it means you pick a career that leaves you time at the end of the day to indulge it. Maybe you have a day job and a passion and that's fantastic. But just don't neglect the thing about you that makes you weird because that was my mistake and Jeopardy was the only thing that rescued me.

45:27People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network and is produced by Freakonomics Radio and Stitcher. Matt Hickey is the producer, and our sound designer is David Herman. We had help on this episode from James Foster. All of the music you heard on the show was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at radio at Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

46:01The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.

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