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I remember each of my triumphs in a trivia game because they are so rare. (Highlight, 2023: Who is Barry Manilow?) I do not shine in bar-trivia night, or charades, or Sporcle. At home, my track record when shouting out Jeopardy answers was always worse than anyone else’s on the couch, including my own children, who are obviously much younger than I am. What is Walden? What is Mount Everest? What is a pansy? Whatever comes at the end of “What is,” I usually do not know. The children long ago moved on to the British quiz show University Challenge, which I watched only once and never again, to preserve my sense of authority as a parent and also my self-worth (“If the number of the year of the Battle of Hastings is divided by the number of wives of Henry VIII, which pope’s numerical designation do you get?”)
I’ve always comforted myself by saying that trivia was a pointless accumulation of junk in the brain, the mental equivalent of a cluttered closet. But this is obviously just envy. Knowing trivia is a skill like any other. It can be learned, practiced, and serve you well in many ways beyond shouting answers to the TV.
On this episode of Radio Atlantic: Drew Goins—an Atlantic staff writer, a Jeopardy champion, and the creator of The Atlantic’s new trivia game, Rabbithole—shares his secrets on winning at Jeopardy and cultivating a very particular brand of curiosity.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I have never had the desire to go on Jeopardy. Like, at all. And to be clear, I haven’t been invited either.
Alex Trebek: If you’re ready, then let us play Jeopardy.
Rosin: My track record when I’m sitting on the couch, shouting out answers, is not good.
[Music]
Rosin: I don’t have the patience or the talent to memorize trivia, and I don’t crave the spotlight or pressure that comes with it. But recently, I started to feel like even though I don’t want to be a Jeopardy champion, it might be worth it to start thinking like one.
I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.
Drew Goins is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He created The Atlantic’s new trivia game, Rabbithole. But more importantly for this conversation and his Instagram following, he’s also a Jeopardy champion.
Ken Jennings: Drew Goins, congratulations! $35,000 for you, and you’re—
Rosin: And his approach to the game and to championdom is not what I expected, which is: Just be a born genius.
Turns out, it helps to be curious. Be the kind of person who finds joy in knowledge for knowledge’s sake, which seems like a quality that could be good for life, not just Jeopardy.
Also, there are some tricks, secrets that only a champion would know.
Drew Goins: The key to winning at Jeopardy is not knowing everything; the key to winning at Jeopardy is knowing one thing about everything.
Rosin: Today on the show: how to win at Jeopardy.
Drew, welcome to the show.
Goins: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Rosin: I’m very honored to have a Jeopardy champion.
Goins: A Jeopardy champion and a Jeopardy loser—let’s not forget that.
Rosin: So what was the first moment when you saw Jeopardy and thought, That’s me. I wanna do that. That speaks to me?
Goins: I think this is gonna be a common answer for people of my age, which is: the original run of Ken Jennings.
He is obviously the host now. He won 74 games before that in the mid-aughts. And I remember watching and thinking, Oh my God, you know, this dweeby software engineer is the coolest person I have ever seen.
Ken will say he’s still kind of amazed that people find him cool or whatever. But I have this very vivid childhood memory of being on a family beach vacation and scurrying back in from the ocean because it was almost 7 o’clock, and Ken was still playing, and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00.
And that day at the, you know, boardwalk, I had won some inflatable raft to take into the ocean, and I spent the episode blowing it up with my mouth. We did not have a pump or anything. And so by the end of the episode, I was so lightheaded from blowing up this raft. And then Ken loses.
Trebek: —FedEx. His wager was $5,601. He winds up in second place with $8,799.
Goins: It’s his 75th game.
[Applause]
Trebek: All good things have to come to an end, don’t they? Well, too bad for Ken, but he’s going home with a lot of money.
Goins: And I’m, like, a middle schooler at the time. And I’m like, Oh, surely, I’m hallucinating. It must be the lack of oxygen in my brain. This can’t be happening. (Laughs.)
Rosin: (Laughs.)
Goins: And then I asked my dad, “Did that really happen?” And he said, “Son, I’m afraid so.” I went on to avenge the legacy of Ken Jennings.
Rosin: So how did you go about studying? Like, how does one actually study? I feel like I’ve seen documentaries about spelling-bee kids, so I do have a sense of what their life looks like. What does a Jeopardy kid’s life look like?
Goins: The spelling-bee comparison I think is gonna be elucidating because when these kids are prepping for the Scripps, they have a really discrete amount of information to learn. Obviously, the English language is very generative. There are tons and tons and tons of words, so it’s strange to say discrete, but they learn their roots, and they learn various suffixes and the way that morphemes combine to form words.
Jeopardy is different, at least at first blush, ’cause it feels like Jeopardy can ask about anything. And so it’s a really overwhelming thing to set out and actually prepare for Jeopardy. I think the first step of it, at least in my experience, happened just in my upbringing, before I was actively preparing for the show, which is just a lifetime of curiosity.
Because it does ask about so much—it just pays to be a really curious person who’s interested in a lot of things. But then once you get what’s called The Call (capital T, capital C)—that’s what Jeopardy people say when you actually get the invitation to come onto the show—that’s kind of when you kick into high gear for studying, studying.
And you realize pretty quickly once you set out to actually learn Jeopardy stuff, that the canon of what Jeopardy asks about and the depth at which Jeopardy asks things is pretty much the same as the spelling bee. Like, there are tricks to pick up, there are bounds to what you need to learn, and you just need to figure out what those bounds are.
Once you go on the show, if you happen to be invited back and do well, people say you kind of get stuck in “forever Jeopardy.” So I might go back again at some point. I’ve gone a couple of times to play Jeopardy. But now that I’m in that space, every day I have an app on my phone that has thousands of flash cards on it. And I am hitting new flash cards to remember what the currency of the United Arab Emirates is, or remember what Pascalization is—these things that you just accrete over time that will disappear if you don’t tend to them.
Rosin: Okay, so now I’m in the other world with you. We’ve moved through the portal, and as you’re in this portal and you’re accumulating this knowledge, what are some taxonomies that you have developed? Like, what is the world of Jeopardy? What’s the landscape? What does it look like? What are you learning?
Goins: I think what Jeopardy really celebrates and what the Jeopardy canon really celebrates is an old-fashioned idea of a well-rounded person. The example that I think of and that a lot of people point to is how much Jeopardy asks about opera.
[Music]
Jennings: It’s time for Final Jeopardy, where we’re getting a little high-brow today. “Opera Source Material” is the category.
Goins: The average Joe Schmo, myself included, before going on Jeopardy does not know a whole lot about opera. But once you hit the Double Jeopardy round, which is where things become a little more rarefied, a little more academic, none of this pop-culture smut that appears in the first round of Jeopardy, you will often get questions about opera.
If you want to know whether something is likely to appear in the Jeopardy canon, ask yourself at a dinner party of a dozen or so well-read guests, Would two or more people know the thing?
Jeopardy has pushed me to want to be a better, more knowledgeable person, including learning things that I didn’t know before. Sports, for instance: I am not much of a sports person, and Jeopardy asks a lot about it. And I think what I tell myself when learning about sports or doing flash cards, It’s like taking my vitamins, right? I tell myself, This is not just for Jeopardy. I think this makes me a more well-rounded person who can maybe have a conversation with somebody that I wouldn’t have had before.
Rosin: Did it ever lead to a genuine interest? Like, did you ever start listening to any of the operas that you learned about?
Goins: I was listening to Carmen yesterday, actually.
Rosin: Ah, okay.
Goins: And I had not been an opera person before.
Rosin: So you’ve talked about what you have to learn. How do you learn it? Memory, the memory palace, and memory tricks are a whole art form of their own. So now that you’ve gotten a sense of the landscape of things you have to know, how does one remember them?
Goins: Kids’ reference books.
Rosin: Kids’ reference books?
Goins: Kids’ reference books. So in addition to bounds of breadth that we’ve been discussing for the Jeopardy canon, it is also a very shallow canon. Jeopardy only asks one thing about most things. If Jeopardy asks about a European duchy, the European duchy is going to be Luxembourg. If it asks about an Iowa painter—I am sure there are great painters in Iowa who are not Grant Wood—
Rosin: (Laughs.)
Goins: —but if Jeopardy asks about it, the Iowa painter is gonna be Grant Wood.
You kind of just have to learn one thing about everything. And what’s great for that are kids’ reference books. I’m talking about kids’ encyclopedias, kids’ atlases, all of those, like, What Is guides. So I checked out from my public library at the time What Is the Super Bowl?
Rosin: (Laughs.)
Goins: And I promise I know what the Super Bowl is, but I wanted that one thing beyond just football.
Rosin: Yeah, yeah.
Goins: These kids’ reference books—this is a trick that super-champion James Holzhauer also points to as having helped him—are great because they are really well shaped for the ethos of Jeopardy, of a survey of information that goes only so deep. And they’re colorfully illustrated. They are a joy to read.
I grew up reading them, and when I went off to high school, college, whatever, I kind of reluctantly set them aside because I was like, Oh, well, I’m a serious adult now who needs to read books that don’t have pictures. And then when I got the call to go on Jeopardy, I was like, Ooh! For listeners, I’m rubbing my hands together gleefully right now. I was like, I get to read children’s reference books again.
Rosin: Yeah.
Goins: Because getting to learn a little bit about so much is just really, really delightful.
[Music]
Rosin: I was a little hung up on this kids’-reference-book thing, so I decided to put it to the test. I made Drew play a quick round of Jeopardy and had him explain how he knew or didn’t know the answers. And just like a real game of Jeopardy, Drew didn’t have access to the questions ahead of time. I swear.
Okay, here we go.
Rosin: Dennis Hopper won a Best Villain MTV Movie Award for menacing a bus in this film.
Goins: What is Speed?
Rosin: Yes. So that was kind of a guess.
Goins: That was a guess, but Jeopardy clues are written very economically. Very rarely is there a word in there that is not in some way pointing you to the answer.
So I’ve, like—I had no idea Dennis Hopper was in that movie, which I have never seen, but I know Speed to be possibly the only movie that takes place almost entirely on a bus.
Rosin: Interesting.
After 3,388 performances and an eight-year run, this musical was no longer “the word” when it closed April 13, 1980.
Goins: Another little clue in there. What is Grease?
Rosin: Yes! What was your clue?
Goins: “The word.”
Rosin: The word.
Goins and Rosin simultaneously: (Sings.) Grease is the word.
Rosin: Yeah, exactly.
Goins: See, I would not have known that just from the statistics of it, ’cause there are, you know, a lot of long-running musicals. But you have to know Jeopardy’s language too.
Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
This colorful cake got a boost in popularity from Steel Magnolias, where it was an armadillo-shaped groom’s cake.
Goins: “This colorful cake.” So from there I’m thinking, Okay, what’s a cake with a color in the name? What is red-velvet cake?
Rosin: Yes. I see how this is working. This is essentially: The Jeopardy mind would know to discount the irrelevant and very obscure—not necessarily obscure, but the more detailed information in here.
Goins: Right. See, it’s great if you happen to have seen Steel Magnolias, which a lot of people have, but really well-written Jeopardy clues offer a backdoor into the answer as well.
Rosin: Yeah. Yeah, ’cause “armadillo-shaped groom’s cake” is not gonna get you there. But “colorful cake,” there aren’t that many well-known cakes with a color.
Goins: Yeah. So red velvet is a reasonable guess.
[Music]
Rosin: There’s no shortage of hacks and tricks you can learn to prepare for a Jeopardy game. But what can Jeopardy do for you? That’s after the break.
[Break]
Rosin: Okay, so I feel like we’ve covered the theory of Jeopardy. Now I wanna ask you about the reality.
Goins: Sure.
Rosin: What was your very first time on the show?
Goins: My first time on the show was in June 2024.
Jennings: Drew Goins is a journalist from Honolulu, Hawaii, and being from the Aloha State—
Goins: And when you go on Jeopardy for the first time, they don’t put you up in a hotel. They don’t pay for travel or anything. You are paying for your own way.
Even if you come in third, you get $2,000 as your prize. I think the thinking is: That covers your expenses, and you get to have this experience. But it is kind of isolating because you’re out in California, terra incognita, by yourself. And I showed up to the studio, and you go past the studio gates at Sony Picture Studios, and you’re ushered into this parking garage, and there are a circle of chairs and a metal detector, and that’s it.
But then you go through that security screening, and then you go on to Stage 10, which is where the show is actually recorded, and all of a sudden, you open up the doors, and you’re greeted by a model podium and this wall of Emmys, and a hockey jersey that had been given to Trebek with his last name on it, and all of a sudden it feels so real.
[Music]
Goins: And you get just a chill. Oh, I’m giving myself chills right now describing it, which is how much of a dork I am.
And I remember going into the greenroom for the first time. And in the months, years since I’ve played Jeopardy, I think of this greenroom as—this is gonna sound so hokey—but as one of my happy places.
Because the people who are in there are your fellow contestants, who are just as nervous as you are and just as big of fans as learning inconsequentia. As the nervous energy wears off a little bit, people start warming up and they start sharing fun facts about things, and showing off their little trivia, maybe out of nervousness, maybe out of friendliness. A mixture of the two, possibly.
And by an hour in, everybody’s just saying, “Oh, well, did you know this? Did you know this? Did you know that?” And everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, of course, of course. Then what about this?” And it’s just this bacchanalian celebration of knowledge, and the knowledge is flowing left and right. It is so exciting to be in a room of people who aspire to what Jeopardy wants you to aspire to.
Rosin: Okay, so you’re there in your first game. This is 2024, and how does it go?
Goins: I lose. (Laughs.)
Rosin: And do you remember any of the—
Goins: I lose stylishly.
Rosin: What do you mean? You looked good losing, or?
Goins: I certainly didn’t look good. I looked [like a] deer in the headlights. No, I played a really, really good game, and I lost narrowly.
I was leading until the very end, when my competitor David Erb, he finds the final Daily Double and wagers really big. It’s a Civil War question. The answer is Lee’s Miserables, a play on Les Miserables, and he springs in front of me. And then he gets Final Jeopardy right.
Jennings: So David Erb’s lead of $22,000, looking pretty good right now. Did he come up with Macbeth? He did. Well done. What did you wager, David?
Goins: I get it wrong, adding insult to injury.
Jennings: Drew Goins had an impressive second-place total of $16,800 today. Did he think of Macbeth? “Who is Titus Andronicus?” That’s even a bloodier play but unfortunately not correct.
Goins: But I played well enough that they, a couple of months later, ring me up and say, “Would you like to come back for the Second Chance tournament?” So I feel surpassingly lucky to have had not just one opportunity to play this dream of mine, but two, when most people get zero bites at the apple.
Jennings: Drew, welcome back. I hope you enjoyed your first appearance on Jeopardy.
Goins: I ultimately win the Second Chance competition. So I go to the next one, and I finish second in that, but by some other odd twist of fate, one of the contestants who was supposed to go into the Tournament of Champions is not able to play. And so I take her spot, and then I make it to the semifinals of the Tournament of Champions, where I, sadly, once again, fall short, but was brought back again for this year’s Jeopardy Invitational Tournament, which, as I said earlier, “forever Jeopardy,” right? Who knows what’s next.
Rosin: By the way, how much did you win?
Goins: I won just shy of $100,000.
Rosin: Oh! What?
Goins: Yeah.
Rosin: That’s incredible.
Goins: Pretty good.
Rosin: And what do Jeopardy champions do with their money?
Goins: (Laughs.) Nothing! If you’re struggling to fall asleep any night, just call up a former Jeopardy champion and ask them what they did with their money, because I can guarantee you it is in a high-yield savings account, or it is in very safe index funds.
I have a friend, Adriana, who won a whole bunch of money on the show, multiple times more than I won, and when she went back for a return appearance, she was asked how her life has changed since winning the money, and she said, “Oh, well, I’ve become a little more liberal with my boba budget.”
Rosin: (Laughs.)
Goins: I was like, “I should hope so. I really should hope so.”
Rosin: So this is not like calling up lottery winners.
Goins: No. It is not. Yeah.
Rosin: So I’ve heard people defend Jeopardy by saying, for example: “In an era of disinformation, we should respect this accumulation of facts.” Do you buy that theory?
Goins: I think that some people who are real defenders of trivia and fans of it like to frame it as an act of resistance or defiance. But I think that asks trivia to do things that trivia is not well equipped to do. There’s this common response variable of being a good, educated person and enjoying Jeopardy, and that common response variable is loving knowledge.
But I think we need to set trivia apart from that. What is so beautiful about trivia is that it really doesn’t matter. It is just knowledge purely for the sake of knowledge. I pick up these facts, and I get this little tickle of excitement when I see something that’s just sparkly or delightful, not because I know that I’m gonna use it, let alone use it to stop the creeping tide of authoritarianism in the United States, but because it’s this beautiful little jewel.
It is good and delightful to know that the Tuskegee Airmen flew mostly P-51 Mustangs, but knowing that one little bit of trivia is not gonna stop anybody from removing the Tuskegee Airmen from a curriculum. That’s just not what trivia is for or capable of.
Rosin: So then how did you start to think about knowledge or you in relation to knowledge? It’s not necessarily knowledge as liberation or as a path to liberation. It’s not necessarily knowledge as protest. It’s not necessarily knowledge as a thing you have to conquer and amass, and conquer and amass.
So what is the value to you, or what has the value been to you over time?
Goins: Preparing for and playing Jeopardy has really led me to see knowledge like I’d never seen it before, as this ocean out there.
[Music]
Goins: I think of my beach trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where Ken lost, and the next day when I was out on my raft that I had blown up with my own two lips, and just floating on top of this enormous body, knowing that I would never come close to experiencing all or even a small part of it, but delighting and just splashing right below the surface.
And to me, that’s what trivia is like, where I can stand on the shore of this body and scoop out something that will bring me a little bit of joy.
Rosin: Whew, Drew, I’m with you out there. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Goins: Thank you. This was a blast.
Rosin: Listeners, if you want to try your hand at trivia, Drew has a new game on The Atlantic website. It’s called Rabbithole.
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jacob Smollen. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Sam Fentress fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.
The post Secrets of a Jeopardy Champion appeared first on The Atlantic.
