Ken Jennings on Why Facts Still Matter on “Jeopardy!”

0:00Hi, everyone. I'm thrilled to be on stage this morning with the unbelievably impressive Ken Jennings. There are many adjectives I could use, but impressive is what I went with. That works for anybody. You can get a war criminal up here and say, wow, it's really... It's really impressive what he pulled off.

0:25That's, of course, Jeopardy! legend Ken Jennings. Ken grew up watching the syndicated version of Jeopardy! hosted by Alex Trebek. But when that show debuted in 1984, Ken was actually living in South Korea. His dad was an international lawyer who moved the family to Seoul when Ken was in first grade. And so Ken was watching Jeopardy! on the only English-language TV channel available to him, which was the Armed Forces Korea Network. In 2004, when Ken was living in the States again and working as a software engineer, he fulfilled his lifelong dream of competing on Jeopardy! and he was historically good.

1:00He won a record 74 games in a row, earning more than$2.5 million. And for many years, he was America's highest-earning game show contestant, with various Jeopardy tournaments and other quiz shows bringing his total earnings to a whopping$5 ,796 ,214. The New York Times described Ken back in 2004 as a throwback to the days when ordinary people got on television for doing well, not something shameless. He's been described by other publications as America's hardest working nerd and the seabiscuit of geekdom. In 2020, he won the greatest of all time tournament on Jeopardy, cementing his status as the GOAT.

1:37And then, of course, he succeeded Alex Trebek as the host of Jeopardy just a few years ago. I got the chance to speak with Ken live on stage at this year's New Yorker Festival. And we're sharing the conversation today so that listeners can get a peek behind the curtain of one of the all-time great game shows, Jeopardy. I'm Tyler Foggett, and this is The Political Scene.

2:05Thank you so much, Tyler. What a pleasure. This is very exciting for me. I could not be more excited, personally. It's like if you read The New Yorker, and then suddenly you're on stage at the festival, it's a little bit analogous to watching Jeopardy and then suddenly going on the show. Like, The New Yorker has kind of risen up to surround me, like Tron. as I always dreamed it would. So as one fan wrote online several months ago, how lucky are we that the perfect host for the show also just so happens to be the greatest to ever play the game?

2:42That is a lovely sentiment, but I think you can hear how improbable it is. Like what are the odds that someone would be good at playing Jeopardy but could also host it? And I think the answer is it's kind of analogous to quarterbacks becoming sportscasters. Not all of them can do it, but the ones that can, they're not good at first, and I was not, but they know the game well enough to kind of keep their head above water until they figure out the broadcasting part of it. And then some of them are pretty good. How does it help you? Does it ever get in the way? Does it ever get in the way? I mean, the main thing about hosting Jeopardy is it moves so fast.

3:19You're not really putting on any kind of persona. I really kind of feel like I'm just playing Jeopardy at speed with the players every night. I just don't have a buzzer. So I'm very into the game. I'm excited. I want to know what's going to happen next. I'm still trying to do all the things, all the things that Alex was so perfect at. Read every clue perfectly because you're kind of narrating a whole audio book every night. And set the stakes for the home audience so they have a little bit of play-by-play and color commentary. You're also the umpire. You're making difficult rulings, even though you're backed up by the judges.

3:52So all of that stuff is going on. But basically, I just kind of feel like I'm enjoying the game like I did when I was in my playing days. Now, that sounds like an ex-quarterback. Well, when I was still on the Yankees, shut up, A-Rod.

4:11So in terms of reading the clues, we'll talk more about this later. But obviously, a big part of Jeopardy is buzzing in. Like that's kind of the thing that determines who wins a game a lot of the time. And you and a lot of other contestants used to study Alex Trebek's speech patterns. And I would assume that people are now studying your speech patterns so that they know exactly when to, you know, use their signaling device. And so, I mean, do you have like a pressure to speak consistently? Because I'm like such a bad person, I would just like intentionally like introduce pauses to mess people up and stuff.

4:45I would not be able to help myself. I wouldn't say like when you say studying Alex Trebek's cadence, it makes it sound like I'm some kind of like Professor Henry Higgins weirdo with a gramophone or something. Yeah. But that's kind of true. Like just having listened to Alex read clues for decades, I feel like I did have a sixth sense of here's what happens. The host starts reading a clue. The players are reading ahead because they can see the screen like you can at home. You can read faster than the host can read out loud. So you're trying to get to the response before the host does. Do you take that second?

5:16Is it right? Does it make sense? Do you feel confident enough about it to buzz? And if you decide you're going to, then you're just laser-focused on the end of the sentence. Last few syllables beat buzz, because you can't buzz early, as some of you may know. Has anybody here ever been on Jeopardy? I bet there's a few. Front row. Any others? Congratulations. As you may know, you can't buzz as soon as you know it. You have to wait for the host to finish reading the clue, then at that point your buzzer is activated, and then you can buzz in. If you buzz in too early, you actually lock yourself out for a fraction of a second.

5:50I think people at home are often like, hey, Gary's buzzer is broken. No, it's just the adrenaline is making the players kind of buzz a little bit on the fast side. I was more of a, listen, I know Alex is reading so well that I'll just kind of time it to when I see the lights come on at home. Like when I see somebody buzzing at home. That's probably a pretty good proxy for the right millisecond to buzz. And it turned out it worked. And today I think people are doing the same thing about my voice. So I do try to think about that. I read consistently. There's a lot of things that the reader of the clue can do to help the players get to the right answer.

6:24And that is what Jeopardy wants. We are never trying to confuse anybody, even though the clues are difficult. The show only works if the players have a fair shot at answering every clue. And that's what we are just hoping for. You do want a few triple stumpers though, right? We're not against the occasional clue that nobody knows. It's a little moment to breathe in the game. It makes the audience feel smart. Do you guys love it when you know something that they don't know? It's the best feeling in the world. I recently had it watching. Sorry, Erwin. Yeah, I really just asked to do this event so that I could tell everyone about this moment I had.

7:00But it was, yeah, I was watching Jeopardy and there was like an influencer category. and it was the hardest question, and this photo of Alex Earle appears on the screen, and I'm at home thinking, that's obviously Alex Earle, and no one got it. And unfortunately, it was the kind of thing where I think my husband actually thought less of me for being able to get that answer. In Quiz Bowl, we used to say there's no shame. Like, a right answer is a right answer. It doesn't matter how much you know about Love Island or whatever, like, that's... Do you guys talk about how lowbrow you want to get on a show where half the questions are about Shakespeare?

7:35Like, how do you balance that? The writing of Jeopardy is basically the whole enterprise of the show. Like, Jeopardy is the writer's show. And one of the things that goes into building the boards is balancing them. You know, categories are written by a big staff of writers, but they have colors. You know, this one's an academic, you know, blue for academic or whatever they are. This one's a wordplay category. This one's pop culture. And there is kind of a formula of, oh, we haven't had TV yet this week, and we need a second pop culture category this board. Are there ever specific questions about, is this person Jeopardy worthy?

8:14I think not so much. I think anybody can be a Jeopardy clue. Maybe you don't want Mr. Beast three times a week. But if the people know it, that's what Jeopardy should be. How involved are you in choosing the clues and shaping the questions? We have an award-winning writing staff, eight or 10 writers, similar army of researchers, like New Yorker style, fact-checking every clue, double-sourcing every fact and every clue. They do not need me kibitzing. But that said, over the years, Alex would occasionally have an idea, like, what if we did this category? Or, you know, I just saw this fact at a museum.

8:48Couldn't this be a final jeopardy? And I do the same thing. Like, if I see something in the wild, there was something just yesterday, but I can't tell you. It might be on the show. The first time it happened, I was in the Old North Church in Boston, and there was a plaque for where Gerald Ford raised the third lantern. And I was like, for the bicentennial, I was like, oh, this could be a final jeopardy. You know, Gerald Ford in this building raised the third lantern in 1976. And the writers agreed, and they put it on the show, and then nobody got it right. So I just felt guilty. So I'm wondering, like, going back to when you were a contestant, at what point did you realized that you were the best Jeopardy player or at least one of the best Jeopardy players of all time?

9:31Like, was it game 15? Was it game 40? Was it like years after your streak was over and no one had even come close to beating it that you were like, oh, I really cooked? Okay, let me make two things clear. One is that there's a lot of luck in a game of Jeopardy and there are maybe, I think I went back and looked once just for the math. And there's about a dozen games in my run where if one clue goes another way, I actually lose that game, including my first game. Like I'm one clue away from being a zero game Jeopardy champion. But like for whatever reason, a few breaks went my way. And so the implication of that is that on any given night, you know, it's unclear who the best Jeopardy player was.

10:18Like I would come back for tournaments and get beaten time and time again by the pride of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Brad Rutter, amazing Jeopardy player who just really had my number during tournaments. And also, I never thought that I was... My goal coming in was just not to be negative at the end of Double Jeopardy because you know how people just disappear from the stage during final. So that was really my only expectation. To this day, I think it's weird that it happened. Well, we actually have a clip of that first Final Jeopardy, which I would love to watch if you're down. I love looking at my weird, eyebrowless, younger self.

10:57That's exactly what we're going to do. Please roll the first Jeopardy clip.

11:18And she's still going strong. Jerry Harvey, we start with you. What did you put down? Which athlete did you think of? Marion Jones, you are correct. And you add a dollar. You go to 7 ,401. Let's go to Julia Lazarus. Did she come up with Marion Jones? She's shaking her head. Why? She was going for somebody else, and I can't figure out who. Gail? I can't figure out who either. But somebody named Gail. Every girl named Gail watching the program today is going to be very happy. You lost$37.99. That drops you down to$14 ,801. Let's go to Ken Jennings. And even$20 ,000 going into final. Who is Jones?

11:54And we will accept that in terms of female athletes. There aren't that many. And you've got$17 ,101 more for a$37 ,201 total. And you become the Jeopardy! champion.

12:13I was like weirdly nervous watching that even though I knew the outcome I think it's the music it's the music yeah how do you feel watching that uh I always think when I see clips of me on Jeopardy I always think boy that guy's dressed very badly um and there I always think about how close it came you know Alex pauses for a second and looks over at the judges and that's when I realize, you realize this very fast, oh, what if Marion Jones is right, but they don't take Jones because there was some other track and field star named Jones that I'm not thinking of. And I suddenly realized I'm going to lose this just because I didn't write Marion.

12:50And then I just remember the wave of euphoria because like one win is enough because you're like, oh, I did it. I went through this gauntlet and I'm a Jeopardy champion. And they can't take that away from you. And for the rest of the run, I was like, well, that's enough. I'm already a Jeopardy champion, everything else is kind of gravy at that point. So you mentioned kind of cringing at the way that you used to dress on the show. But I have to say that's like the charm of Jeopardy. I mean, it's Jeopardy, not like America's Next Top Model. And it's kind of amazing that you have this show that is so exciting to watch.

13:23And yet the contestants are teachers and librarians and grad students and software engineers. Like those are some of the most common professions, I think of people on the show. And so, you know, my question is, is it possible for someone to be too nerdy to come on Jeopardy? Like, I know that there's a, you know, an initial test that you have to take to qualify. And then after that, there's an in-person component. And so I'm wondering, like, what actually happens in that audition process after you pass the Jeopardy test? We do assign everybody a nerdiness quotient or NQ that, no, this is a little bit above my pay grade.

14:00I mean, obviously I got on, so the mark of whatever telegenic-ness is, is not super high. But I think in the past, one of the reasons why we have that in-person portion is just to see, to try to get a sense of who will excel once they're on TV. You know, you've taken a very hard written test to get on the show. Weirdly, that is not a perfect Venn diagram circle with being good TV, you know, like being able to answer very hard trivia questions, not actually a good proxy for who's great on TV. So we just want people who can kind of walk and chew gum at the same time, who will be able to keep up with the game and hopefully not kind of go deer in the headlights.

14:38For a while, maybe there was a sense of, you know, this person might actually be not a good fit for Jeopardy, even though their test scores are very good. And now I think there's much more of a sense of, let's just put the best people on. Because as you say, the charm of Jeopardy is, it's kind of a throwback to regular people being on TV without any sense that they've been glammed up that much or because reality shows are not like that anymore. Even though there's more real people on TV than ever before, they're not themselves. That's for sure. So, I mean, a part of the process is figuring out who will be able to kind of swing it on TV.

15:20You don't really know until the person is actually on the show, right? Like even if there's a practice round or something that's not the same as... And there is. Yeah. And so, I mean, has anyone ever like freaked out? Yeah, it's extremely intense to be on Jeopardy. We think of it as calming, almost ritualized entertainment. This is the thing that's on at seven o 'clock and it always goes and sounds exactly like this. And if I went back in time, this is exactly how it would be in 2005 or 1985. But in fact, when you're there, it's extremely tense. It feels like a blood sport because you've never been on TV before in almost every case.

15:59So people are kind of nervous and it feels surreal. You're a little bit out of your body. And then the game just moves so fast and it's so high pressure and everybody else is so smart. It is an intimidating thing and people are going through big feelings out there, even though they look calm every night. So please like spare your most charitable thoughts for the Jeopardy contestants every night who are really putting themselves out there and who are probably really going through some stuff while you're watching. It's a big ask. And so we do occasionally see, I have seen tears. I have seen borderline panic attacks.

16:33It's intense out there. You don't see that part on TV though. So do you like stop and then let the person come back after their panic attack or does the round restart? Like, how do you deal with that? Like if a contestant can no longer function during the recording? interestingly, whatever those moments are, they almost always happen off camera. They happen during the break. Like the gate, the pull of the Jeopardy game or the propulsion of the game of Jeopardy is so strong for people who know the show well, as I assume many of you do, that you can drop people into it and they can kind of go on autopilot.

17:03And then during the commercial, that's when they're like, what just happened? I'm up by 3000 or I'm down by 6000 or that's when they kind of have the alien abduction is over and they're like, but we've all grown up on Jeopardy and so people can kind of do it and it's just an amazing thing to watch. This is the political scene from The New Yorker. More of my conversation with Ken Jennings after the break.

17:34Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne Tha God, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

18:10You mentioned in Brainiac, your book published in 2006, I should also mention that Ken is a New York Times bestselling author of many books. You mentioned in the book that there was, at least at that time, there was a long backlog of men who would qualify for the show through their test, but hadn't been on yet. But there were fewer women. Like you noticed that women were getting faster callback times, ostensibly because there were fewer women trying to get on the show. is this still the case and are there other patterns you've noticed like whether it's gender or like a certain kind of like do you have too many attorneys like that's always true i think uh it's actually gotten a lot better the the big sea change for jeopardy and this kind of predates my time is you know when i tried out for the show i had to i had to wait you had to wait for jeopardy to come to your town go to the mall do a little questionnaire and then be invited back Or in my case, a friend and I drove down to L.A.

19:05just to show up at the Radisson and try out for Jeopardy. And this self-select, as you can imagine, for a certain kind of very confident trivia kind of person. And so what you get is like too many, like proportionally, you get too many white men trying out for Jeopardy because that's the kind of person who watches Jeopardy and thinks, eh, you know. Like, you know, when you pull like how many men think they could take a point from Serena Williams, you know. You can get 35 % of men to be like, eh, when in fact the real answer is no. So I think because of how that worked, you would get people who assumed they were good at trivia, and then you got more men than women trying out because just the kind of the imposter syndrome of, you know, all the things that come with our culture about, you know, performing as a woman in a high-pressure environment like that.

19:58And when we moved the test to online, just lowered some barriers to entry. Like that turned out to be great. It did not solve the problem. But we now have women trying out at a greater percentage, people of color trying out at a greater percentage than before. It hasn't like solved the problem we have of like wanting Jeopardy to look more like America, but it went a long way. It's also easier to study for Jeopardy now, right? It's a whole different era. Like when I was on the show, like those three people you see, they're just kind of like people who did it as a lark. Like we like Jeopardy. Our friends say that we should go on.

20:30But these are just normal people. And today, increasingly, we're in a moneyball era of Jeopardy where people do train for years to be on the show. I know people who have essentially built simulators at home the way a pilot might. People who have their own buzzer lineups, people who write their own software to barrage them with Jeopardy clues. People who do study the math, the game theory of the wagering. It's been professionalized. And of course, the strategies have changed. Yeah, I want to ask you a lot more about the strategies. So the strategy of hunting for the Daily Doubles, that's something that we often associate with Holtzauer, who used it so successfully.

21:06But I feel like the first time that I noticed it happening was in the game that you and Brad Rutter played against Watson, the IBM supercomputer, which seemed to be on the prowl for the Daily Doubles. And then you guys kind of had to do the same thing in order to compete with it. I mean, do you trace some of those strategies back to the Watson game? When IBM programmed Watson, they interviewed a lot of Jeopardy contestants with ideas on strategy and so forth. And I think a lot of those ideas actually came from humans to Watson back to humans, just like AI is taking human work today and then using it to put humans out of work.

21:44And I think that came from, I mean, people have been jumping around the board since the 80s. That was a player named Chuck Forrest. The Forrest Bounce. The Forrest Bounce. And it wasn't to look for daily doubles. It was to keep your opponents a little off balance. Like if they're still thinking about opera and you hop to nine letter words, maybe they're going to forget that they're looking for a nine letter word. And then there were players like Arthur Chu who specifically were looking for Daily Devils. And that's the game changer there. Just probability wise, you want to put the game away as early as possible because I think historically players are about 50 % conversion on Final Jeopardy.

22:18And that's just a lot of uncertainty. You don't want a 50 % chance of winning at that point. If you can lock up the game before Final Jeopardy, you do it. And historically, daily double conversion is much higher. I'm sure for some players, it's upwards of 80%, in fact. So that's why you see players just laser focused on those daily doubles and then making what seem to be like crazy cartoonishly big wagers because they know that's the moment to try to put the game away. And occasionally you'll see a big risk go awry, but it's just like poker. It's still the right way to play. So when you were competing on the show, you played a pretty normal chill game.

22:53Thank you. Yeah, it didn't seem like you were employing some crazy strategy. It seemed like you were just trying to answer as many clues correctly as you could. But you've had to change your strategy over time when you've gone up against players like Holtzauer. So what is it like playing that more aggressive style? Does it feel comfortable? No, I still find it very uncomfortable. At the time, when I was first on, it was not a choice. Everyone played that way. You know, like, oh boy, let's take around the house for 200, Alex. And they would march consecutively through a category. If I know Jeopardy viewers, many of you miss those peaceful, reassuring days of orderly movement down the board.