Buzzy Cohen | A Jeopardy! Champion's Guide to Preparing for the Moments that Matter

0:07Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with Jeopardy! champion and author, Buzzy Cohen. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Tens of thousands of people take the online qualification exam for Jeopardy! every year. But only 0.4 % of hopefuls will appear on the show. But even after a nine-game winning streak and a victory in the tournament of champions, fan favorite Buzzy Cohen maintains that he wasn't actually the smartest contestant in the bunch.

0:51He just trained smarter than his competitors. Buzzy adopted quirky strategies and obsessive techniques, from wearing suits every day to studying while hanging from a chin-up bar. Once he realized how much could be accomplished with great preparation, he became a prep fanatic. Testing his theories on everything from deadlifting to tap dancing. Buzzy joins Google to discuss his audible original book, Get Ready, A Champion's Guide to Preparing for the Moments that Matter. He reveals the eccentric yet effective training method he developed to prepare for the show and empowers listeners to apply these techniques to train for their own challenges.

1:33Originally published in August 2020, here is Buzzy Cohen, a champion's guide to the moments that matter.

1:50Hi, Bobby. It's nice to be here. So glad you're here. So the way this is going to work is I'm going to give you clues and you're going to answer. Yeah, I'm used to that. Yeah, I thought that would be the best way to do this. But let's start with your time on Jeopardy before we get into the book. Sure. Because that's really interesting, you know, and just so people can get to know you a little bit. Fuzzy, you were a fan favorite. You were once described my favorite word that they used to describe you was impish. Your antics were a bit polarizing. You actually got a lot of media attention. Yeah.

2:24People loved you. They said you had a polished, pinched face, good look. You were slammed for your brainy swagger. But was standing out from the end other contestants always one of the goals other than winning Jeopardy? um my goal was to have as much fun as possible um jeopardy is one of those situations where you can only be on the show once you know so I went out there and every time I stepped out on stage I was prepared for it to be my last time on stage and so it wasn't so much about standing out but just enjoying it as much as I could and you know trying to squeeze as much out of that experience as possible.

3:03And so initially, my first goal really was to buzz in, have Alex Trebek say my name and give a correct answer. That was the bar. So after that, everything was gravy. And, you know, once I had a couple wins, I started doing kind of fun intros, mostly so that we could turn them into gifts, me and my friends later. And then, you know, it just kind of snowballed from there. I think I have myself some personality and I've got a kind of a distinctive look. And I think people really, you know, had fun with that and had fun teasing me as well about it, which I was totally okay with. Well, now you're a celebrity.

3:45I mean, one of my favorite things that you did was you actually trolled, trip back a little bit with your SNL, Oman. So, you know, you would say things in Final Jeopardy, like, what is see you tomorrow, Trebek. So when you were doing that, were you actually sort of weighing the money on the table versus being able to seize that moment? So what people don't really realize about Jeopardy is how grueling the schedule is. They tape five shows in one day and sometimes to like finish out a season early or something like that, they'll do even six shows in a day. If you're a returning champion, that means you are taping five shows on your feet, you know, show after show after show, and really having to be on and attentive and engaged.

4:31It's not just like watching five Jeopardy shows in a row. And so for me, when I had those runaway games where I didn't have to bet a dollar and I knew I would win, I bet zero to give myself a little bit more of a break. You know, here's some time where I don't have to use my brain. I don't have to stress about knowing the answer. And so initially, I just bet zero just to take that break. And then I was like, I got to write something. And so I just thought of something kind of fun to say. And the see you tomorrow Trebek was kind of a joke because I knew I would have to run backstage. I'd have 10 minutes to get changed and I would be back.

5:12And tomorrow was really, you know, less than a half an hour later. Um, and so it really came from that. And then I just sort of kept going with it. Cool. Let's talk about some of, you know, your astounding comebacks because, okay, we just talked about you being way in the lead and being able to bet zero, but there were a couple of times, I mean, I was really holding my breath. So what did you mentally have to do to dig yourself out of that kind of hole? Yeah. I mean, the, the, the kind of infamous comeback was in the second game of the finals for the Tournament of Champions. I finished the first day with$0.

5:47I had a tough first game and decided to just bet it all on a Final Jeopardy that I missed. My other opponents missed it too, but they ended up with some money in the bank. So I kind of went out into that second game and just said, like I kind of just said, this is my last time on this stage. I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to have fun. I'm going to play my best. and I think really what it involved was staying in the game that I was in and not worrying about what had happened before and that allowed me to kind of take a lead in the double jeopardy round of that game and then when the daily double came up I had really prepared myself to be able to seize that moment and make the big bet of making it a true daily double when I had to and it wasn't about you know oh I need to make this comeback it was like that's the right move to make here and I didn't hesitate and I think a lot of people get gun shy you know you make a big bet it doesn't pay off and you kind of don't want to don't want to do that make that mistake again and I'd really prepared that when you're in the situation you know what to do you make the bet And then not only did it allow me to be in the position to win, but it also made my opponents play a little more aggressively than they may have, which worked in my favor, too, because they made a couple of mistakes that allowed me to ultimately win.

7:20So it was both like catapulting myself up and also making everyone else play catch up, which was really those two things combined is what got me that tournament of champions win. And that's great. I'm glad that you already started to talk about preparedness because that's what we're going to talk about today. But before we dive into that, I think people are always curious, you know, what is your relationship like with your back and the other players, especially like a Ken Jennings? He was interviewed for this book. I think, like, does it become like a club? Are you in a jeffery club? So there's definitely camaraderie among the other players.

7:59Some of us keep in touch, like Austin Rogers and Alan Wynn, who I was in the finals with for that tournament of champions. We keep in touch a lot. I see them when I'm in LA. They, you know, when I go to New York, I try to see Austin. Other people like Jason Sterlachy, who was in my tournament of champions. We keep in touch. There's a big community on Twitter that kind of all talks about what's going on with the show. Other players I met in that All-Stars tournament, which was great. I mean, these, you know, Ken, Brad, these are people that I really admire. And Ken and I have sort of kept in touch.

8:35And I see Brad. He lives in L.A., so we do pub trivia together sometimes. Dangerous. Yeah, I mean, there's a pub trivia in L.A. that's kind of notorious as being the hardest pub trivia in the country. and there's a bunch of former Jeopardy people that go there. So that's another great way that we all kind of keep in touch. And there are other trivia events that we all kind of attend and mix up teams and want to play with each other. And yeah, it's a great community. In terms of Trebek, because of his status, both as a producer and the host of the show, our interactions with him are extremely limited for legal reasons.

9:14Those of you who have seen the movie Quiz Show, know that there was a big scandal in the 50s about players being given answers or questions being written with the knowledge that these players knew the answers. So game shows are a federally regulated endeavor. And so there's all these compliance and legal people. So what I always tell people is the interaction that you see on TV is basically the amount of interaction we have with Alex Trebek, you know, during the commercial breaks of the taping, he tends to talk to the audience and take their questions. Sometimes we'll have a little chat with him after the show, you know, which you see during when the credits roll.

9:59That's kind of the extent. I've gone to a couple of tapings just to see, you know, to attend. And he'll often say hi to me. Um, obviously he kind of remembers me from, from my appearances, but, um, beyond that, I don't have much of a relationship with him. So just as a follow-up, you had said that it used to be rumored that they would give contestants like all the questions before to study or the answers that is not, right? No, no, they don't give you anything. Um, they, they cannot give you anything, uh, and they do not give you anything. So when you are up on stage, when Trebek starts reading out those categories, that's when you know what you're going to have to deal with.

10:40So sometimes you'll see the players kind of take a little breath and a pause to kind of say, oh, OK, this is what I'm going to be dealing with. There's there's no study materials. It's a vicious rumor that I have made my personal goal to to eliminate. But really, I mean, when you watch the show, those people know that stuff. They know that on their own. Wow is there a category that you particularly like to see or don't like to see like are there any favorites where you got that I really like the before and after style categories so um I I haven't had a pure before and after but I have had um a governmental before and after so that was pretty fun um so uh but the stuff that I don't I'm not a huge sports guy uh so sometimes the sports categories are a little tough for me, but I do okay in those.

11:34The wordplay stuff, you know, anagrams or other kinds of, you know, word puzzle-y kind of things, that's not really my background in trivia. People who come from more like cross-wording and stuff like that are really good at that. Ken Jennings is an example of someone who is really untouchable on wordplay, and you saw that in the GOAT tournament, which I got to go to the taping of. when you look at someone like Ken compared with someone like James, both have incredible trivia knowledge, but Ken is really superior when it comes to the wordplay stuff. Interesting. So, okay. Let's talk about the book a little bit.

12:12Great. So Audible is doing production now. This is an Audible original and it is an audio book and you read it to us, which I love your voice. It's great. But I'm just curious, was it a really grueling process to write a book that you knew was going to be read versus writing a book that you know, read aloud versus writing a regular sort of reading book? So I actually, it was interesting when I wrote the first couple chapters, I submitted them to my editor and she was like, she gave me really great feedback. And she said, you're writing this as a print book and people use audio books differently.

12:49They engage with them differently. So in a print book, for example, you would introduce an anecdote, you'd analyze it, you go into the theory and then maybe return to the anecdote and go into it a little more. That works in a print book because if the person's sort of lost, you can flip back a few pages and remind yourself, oh, right, this was the anecdote that we were talking about. People don't really use audiobooks that same way. So I had to kind of create more like compartmentalize the anecdote versus analysis stuff. And that was a really helpful piece of feedback and allowed me to kind of continue the rest of the audiobook with that in mind.

13:28And the other thing was that I actually, as I got into the fact that this was going to be my voice and not printed in black and white, I think the writing got better. And I integrated a lot of that kind of voice aspect into the revision phase of the first couple chapters. It helped me make it more fun, I think. And it also helped me be a little more free to share this as my experience, the things I've learned, the things that I learned in interviewing the people that I interviewed, and less like, oh, I am the authority, which sometimes you write a book, it's printed in black and white, and you feel like you have to be the authority on something.

14:09And having it be my voice sharing, it was more like a conversation with the reader and a chance to encourage them to try out some of this stuff, examine what they're doing in these particular ways. And I felt a lot of liberation in doing that. The actual recording was incredibly grueling. And so I would, I prepared, you know, using the methods that I talked about in the book, but it was still very hard. And, you know, I would finish around four or five o 'clock every day and I would really like crash out. Like I was, I was out of gas. It was very similar to recording Jeopardy. You know, you're really engaged.

14:49Even if we're working long days, there are more passive aspects of our days, right? Where we're reading something or sort of thinking through a problem or organizing things. And having a full day of really engaged, focused effort is not something where most of us are used to. And so when you experience those, they can really knock the wind out of you. So I did a lot of preparation for that, just as I did for the show. We're going to see how many times we can say preparation during this interview. If somebody else was going to read your book instead of you, did you have any ideas or thoughts on who you would have liked to have heard read your book?

15:28Well, funny enough, I got pneumonia, non-COVID, old school, boring pneumonia, the week before I was supposed to record. And I sent an email to my editor that I was like, if this takes me down, you know, you have my blessing to call Brad Pitt to read this. But I actually think it would be fun if like Jeff Goldblum or someone like that read it, just, you know, someone who in their own way has also a kind of quirky sensibility. Yeah, version two. So maybe you can give everyone just a little bit of an insight into how most people prepare for Jeopardy and then maybe how your preparation was a little bit different.

16:12Right. So most people prepare the conventional wisdom or whatever is you watch the show, you hold a ballpoint pen, you practice buzzing in and shouting out the answer. And that is almost really good advice. It helps a lot of stuff. It helps you work on your reaction time. You get used to the cadence of Alex Trebek's voice, which is a very important part of the buzzer timing aspect of the show. And you also get used to the material that Jeopardy asks and the way that Jeopardy asks questions. So a trivia question you might encounter in a Trivial Pursuit game in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire at Pub Trivia is going to be phrased really differently from Jeopardy because they try to embed a couple clues in each clue and you sort of start to get the way that they do that.

16:59And the way that if they include a certain word, it's probably a little bit of a clue as to what they want you to answer. So that's sort of helpful. And what I found is that it left me wholly unprepared for the actual experience, you know, playing against my dog at seven or 730 at night on the sofa versus being on my feet at 10 a.m. in the studio under lights against two people who knew as much or more than I did. It was just night and day. And so I did a lot of things to try to integrate the internal and external context of the information that I was going to need to know. So what did that mean for me?

17:44Well, I would carve out my study time to be at the times of day when the show tapes, as opposed to in the evening. Those of us who have any experience using our brains during the day, which I hope is everybody who's watching this, if you are someone at Google, know that, you know, at 10 a.m., at 1 p.m., at 3 p.m., at 6 p.m., your focus, your attention, your cognitive abilities are really different. And so what I worked on doing was really training myself in that cognitive context and seeing when I was when I was sharper, when I was maybe a little more dull and working those times to be, to try to just make myself as consistent as possible.

18:34The other thing I did was I realized how stressful the situation of taping the show can be. And I really racked my brain to figure out how to recreate having to use my memory in that stressful internal context, right? Of the cortisol rushing through my brain, my heart pounding, my brain going totally blank. Anyone who's been on the show has had that experience of knowing something and just not being able to come up with it because you're just kind of feel like you're on a roller coaster. And so what I used to do was go to the gym, hang from a chin up bar, hold the top of a plank, push a sled and have a trainer quiz me on my flashcards that I was creating.

19:18And it basically, it didn't train me to not have the stress response, because that's going to happen. It's a big event, you're going to be stressed. What it trained me to do was kind of get through the block of the stress and access all the knowledge that I had. And so that was a huge, huge, huge change for me. And the other thing was, you know, when I did practice watching the show with the buzzer in my hand or my mock buzzer, I did it standing up. I did it wearing a suit and tie. I did it wearing the shoes I was going to wear. I really recreated the experience of being on the show as much as I could.

19:59I would DVR the show and watch it, do my practice watching at 10 a.m., at 11 a.m., at 2 p.m. I started wearing a suit and tie every day. So that little stress of like suiting up disappeared. You know, it was just another day. For a month before the tournament of champions, I woke up at the time of day I was going to have to wake up for the tournament knowing that I'm not a morning person and that, you know the best I can do to kind of get myself used to that challenge the less of a challenge it would be on the day so that's just some of the stuff that I did and there's plenty more and anyone who is really interested in maybe taking the Jeopardy test or if you've taken it and waiting for an audition or if you've had an audition and you're waiting to get the call I would definitely check out you know not to do a plug but there's a lot of little tips and tricks from my experience getting ready for the show.

21:02And there was a huge, huge leap in my performance from my first time, the nine games, to the Tournament of Champions. I was a much more dominant player in the Tournament of Champions. And I continue to improve my abilities at Jeopardy by refining this stuff. And so I think the proof is in the pudding, right? I mean, you did phenomenally well. and those are amazing methods that you just shared with us. And again, there are plenty more in the book. Is there anything looking back you would have done differently? I think, you know, the way I prepared for All Stars was took it even a level further.

21:41I used some methods related to sequence repetition so that in my studying, I was using my time more efficiently. The one thing that I didn't do that well in getting ready for All Stars was, I didn't give my brain enough time to rest. I think I was really, I felt a lot of pressure because it was a team tournament to really do well. And I think I needed to kind of do a deload, as we call it in weightlifting or, you know, like a taper, I used to swim. So there's like a taper period where you kind of, you're still working out, but you're not going to your full, your fullest extreme. And I kind of needed to do a little bit more of that.

22:24I was so anxious and I, the, the like kind of maniacal studying was a way, a coping mechanism for the anxiety. And it really didn't serve me as well as it could have. So I think that's a big thing that I learned about myself. Not everyone needs that, but I really needed it. Well, thank God you don't have anything else going on like a day job or two children. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I had a newborn actually when I was getting ready for all stars. So it was, it was nuts. So one thing that I'm curious about is, you know, when you came up with the concept for this book, did you sort of, when you, did you know that you were sort of doing all of this kind of different preparation for Jeopardy or afterwards, were you sort of like, wow, look at all the things I did that, that worked?

23:15Yeah, it was sort of an afterwards thing. Going into the Tournament of Champions, I felt a lot more pressure to perform well. And I started this process of the book and everything before All-Stars. So it was sort of that post-Tournament of Champions period where I started formulating the book. And I thought of myself like an Olympic athlete, which is sort of silly when you think about Jeopardy, but I was in this elite class of Jeopardy people. And all my friends now had expectations. There were no expectations the first time I was on the show. So I really wanted to do well. And so I was pushing myself to find ways to really improve.

23:53After the tournament of champions, I was really hooked on this, like seeing the results of all that hard work. And I decided to try something else. And I actually entered a national dead lifting competition. And I ended up winning that and applying a lot of the same preparation stuff. And it was in that period that I started talking with people about how I was kind of doing this. And the preparation aspect really caught people's attention. And then I started talking with other people about the kinds of really unique or effective things that they would do to prepare for all different kinds of experiences.

24:31And that was really when I think that this whole thing really took hold. And I think starting from the idea of preparation as opposed to planning, that's a big theme in the book. And it sort of all comes from there. Can you give the definitional differences for us of planning versus preparing? Yeah. A plan is kind of this essentially, plans are fun, right? Because plans are essentially a work of fantasy. It's like, I'm going to do this and then this will happen. I'm going to do this and then this will happen. It's like a recipe, you know? So there's a lot of assumptions that happen in a plan. In terms of Jeopardy, people have these plans like, oh, I'm going to hunt for daily doubles.

25:13I'm going to bet it all on the daily double. I'm going to get it right. I'm going to win all these games. And then they get on stage and there's two other people that are just as smart and fast as they are. And that wasn't part of their plan, right? Preparation is more about thinking through all of the challenges and really giving yourself the ability to work with those challenges, to overcome those challenges, to really be in the moment and not have such a fixed plan. So going back to the recipe analogy, preparation is sort of like learning cooking skills. So it's a lot more work. It's a much bigger time investment.

25:56It can be a lot less fun because you're having to kind of like go step by step and really add these skills that you may not even need. The difference is when you are going along a recipe and something doesn't go according to plan, something takes longer to cook or you don't have an ingredient, it's much harder to roll with it. And maybe you'll be able to, but maybe not. If you have the cooking skills, you can say, oh, this pan, you know, heats up a little faster than than I thought. So I can, you know, I know how to adjust for that, or I can, you know, cut my food, you know, the vegetables a different size, or, oh, I'm, you know, right now, I'm, I'm away, I'm at altitude, I'm at 5000 feet.

26:40So I was cooking a chicken last night and takes longer to cook things at altitude. But because I kind of understand the, the science or the background, or, you know, I'm working off of the, you know, internal temperature and all these other things, It's not just about put it in the oven for an hour, which if I did that, I would have raw chicken. And so that's really the difference of planning and preparing. I know I kind of went into the analogy hard, but just to give you an example, I think a lot of parents like myself are dealing with COVID and what that means for educating our children. And I keep saying that COVID does not like your plans.

27:19Whatever plans you make, COVID is working really hard in an unconscious way to undo those plans. So, for instance, my kid's school sent out a thing a month ago that they were going to be teaching in person. And they had all these different guidelines and they had all this stuff. And then Governor Newsom said, you know, no schools are going back. So that plan is kaput. it. And my wife was, you know, my wife was presenting all these things. What if we did this? What if we did this? What if we tried this? And it was really making me uncomfortable until I framed it in the terms of, oh, we're not trying to make a plan.

27:57We're trying to prepare. We're trying to have a lot of different options. And if X goes wrong, we can roll into Y. And we've already thought through Y. We've already figured out what that involves. And so it's kind of a, it can be a lifestyle, right? Preparing versus planning. And it takes some of the anxiety out of it, even though you're thinking through some worst case scenarios, because you're not, when something goes wrong, you're not totally left with nothing. You're like, okay, cool. This is not what I wanted to happen, but I know how to, I've got three other options that I've already prepared for.