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‘Jeopardy!’ GOAT: Preparation, curiosity essential for success
Being the “Greatest of all Time” on “Jeopardy!” is quite a feat. The game is unpredictable, stressful and, perhaps, sometimes decided on pure luck.
With the first floor of Kresge Auditorium not quite filled to capacity, Ken Jennings tried to apply his own success on the game show to “winning” in different aspects of life during his Ubben Lecture Tuesday evening.
Jennings beat champions James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter in the “Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time” special last month to win $1 million, leaving him with the title of GOAT.
He holds the win-streak record with 74 consecutive wins, as well as the marks for the highest regular-season winnings ($2,520,700) and highest average of correct responses in the show’s 56-year history.
He would first tell you that this is not the result of coming onto the show and winging it.
“It’s preparation,” Jennings said, adding that there is a big difference between being a contestant and watching on TV. “There is nothing to prepare you for how fast-paced Jeopardy! feels when you’re behind the podium.”
He compared going onto the show for the first time to pole vaulting at the Olympics without any practice or guidance whatsoever.
“You’re trying to find the exact right nanosecond between too early and too late,” Jennings said. “And that all comes down to preparation ... The way to prepare is not to study up on ‘what,’ but to study up on ‘how.’”
Getting used to the buzzer is a challenge in and of itself. If a contestant presses it before Alex Trebek finishes an answer, he or she is locked out for a quarter of a second. For Jennings, knowing how and when Trebek enunciates is essential to being first to “ask” the question.
“I think we’re now in the ‘Moneyball’ era of Jeopardy!,” he opined, however. He believed that the lengths contestants can now go to prepare is analogous to sports.
Some will do the math on the likelihood of where the Daily Double will be. Others will set up a simulation with a podium and a buzzer and follow along with the show.
It was a different time when Jennings went on the show in 2004. He recounted how he obsessively watched Jeopardy! back to back. He would stand behind his La-Z-Boy recliner, with a Fisher-Price toy as a makeshift buzzer, to get down that crucial timing.
“I could do it on muscle memory,” Jennings said, “and I escaped through the win in that first game, and then again 73 more times.”
He stated matter-of-factly that there is no way to “cram” all the information a Jeopardy! contestant could need. The best are those who are prepared “for a little bit of everything.”
“People want there to be a secret,” Jennings said. “Jeopardy! people don’t think like that. They are omnivores when it comes to information. They believe everything is a little bit interesting, and that is the only secret.”
To Jennings, success on Jeopardy! is not solely an issue of remembering factoids. Everybody’s memory works fine; it is just about which topics hold someone’s interest.
Jennings also provided that this curiosity as a human element has become progressively threatened by technology. Specifically, technologies such as Siri and Alexa have allowed us to be reliant, not more independent.
Jennings recounted how he and Brad Rutter went up against IBM’s Watson in 2011, only for the program to “wipe the floor” with both of them. It did not help that the show actually had to move and tape where Watson’s supercomputers were based.
“You could tell that it was an away game for humanity,” he laughed.
Jennings compared Watson’s dominance to an assembly line worker being replaced by a robot. He saw that his “niche” of knowing facts was being invalidated by a computer that did it faster.
“It made me a little bit worried about the future of knowing stuff,” he added. “As humans, we tend to deprecate skills that machines have taken over.”
Jennings said it was important to have a baseline of knowledge, because people are not going to look up the thousands of facts they may need on their phones. Having this information in our heads also encourages social interaction.
“I think there’s lots of situations where we don’t realize how valuable the facts in our head are,” he said. “That’s not just Jeopardy! That’s winning in a wide variety of situations in life.”
Jennings then transitioned to the element of luck, which he said was “extremely important” on the show. However, this luck was intrinsically linked to an upbringing that he described as privileged.
He grew up overseas and was surrounded by a different culture. His mother read to him every night, and his father would work through crossword puzzles with him. He highlighted that his general knowledge of geography broadened, especially that of the United States.
“I’m speaking of a very specific kind of Jeopardy! privilege,” Jennings said. “I grew up in a way that I had an educational advantage where all these things were super easy for me. And I never had to think about it, because that’s the definition of privilege.”
Jennings ascribes his success on the show itself to pushing the laws of probability and being confident in his performance, not to being a genius.
“You’re seeing a person who’s been created by a very fortunate upbringing that not everybody gets,” he said.
He pinpointed high tuition costs and “crippling” student loans as specific academic limitations. More broadly, he advocated skepticism of “successful” figures seeking more clout based on their own supposed exceptionalism.
Coming to the end the lecture, Jennings advocated that curiosity and sticking to interests were the most important components to leading a life of happiness and purpose.
“They are sacred things, the talents you have, the passions you have,” he said. “Think about the thing that obsesses you and realize that obsession is destiny.
“Live your lives in the form of a question,” Jennings told the audience. “That is my challenge to you.”