The Costco Connection

JULY 2014 ;e Costco Connection 23

So when The Connection recently met with Ken Jennings, the show’s longest-reigning champion— 74 consecutive wins—at a Seattle bookstore, it seemed only fitting to conduct the interview in a way that would make the 40-year-old Costco member from Seattle feel comfortable. So I played Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek and gave Jennings the answers. He took it from there to discuss his life, his accomplishments and tips on ways to obtain and retain information (see sidebars on the next page).

The answer is … Jeopardy!

“What is the game show that made Ken Jennings a celebrity?” Discussing how he came to apply to be a contestant, Jennings says, “I would literally watch it, sit at home watching these people, and think, ‘Man, these people are so smart. How do you get this job?’ ” At Brigham Young University, he was a member of the Quiz Bowl Team, which would participate in tournaments testing contestants’ knowledge of academic subjects. “It’s a sort of a weird little insular subculture,” he explains. “I started to see people I knew from those tournaments on these shows, [such as] Win Ben Stein’s Money, or popping up on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or all those Millionaire clones that they had in the early 2000s. And this guy I knew from college, suddenly I saw him winning $2.2 million on Millionaire or something, and I thought, ‘These are real people. One can actually do this.’ ” Then living in Salt Lake City, he and a friend drove to Los Angeles for an audition. “They tell you not to drive down because the odds are incredibly long—tens of thousands of people trying out every year for 400 spots,” Jennings says. “It’s five times harder, by the numbers, than getting into Harvard or Yale.” The hopefuls take a very hard written test, he says. “Then they grade that and the room pretty much clears. Those who are left get to do a little mock game, where you actually hold the buzzer and try to smile and not look like an idiot. And then it’s pretty much, ‘Don’t call us; we’ll call you.’ ” In his case, a full year went by before he got the call that he had made the show and was needed in Los Angeles for the real competition.

That was in February 2004, when Jennings was working as a computer programmer. He would fly to Los Angeles for two days, do 10 shows and then fly home. His wife, Mindy, knew and he had to CONTINUED ON PAGE 24

Name: Ken Jennings

Member at: Aurora Village, Washington

Member since: 1999

Contact: www.ken-jennings. com; @kenjennings on Twitter Comments about Costco:

“I like that Costco pays its employees a living wage.

Everyone talks about the rotisserie chicken here, but I’m all about the sugar snap peas and the shrimp salad. I bought my last car through Costco and am pretty excited that you can get caskets at member pricing now. Can’t wait.”

AUGUST

MEMBERPROFILE

inform his boss, but, because of a nondisclosure agreement, he couldn’t tell anyone else since the shows wouldn’t air for months.

“My co-workers had to have some alibi about my kid being sick, or, if my parents called, I had to pretend I was at work, even if I was driving on the 405 to Sony Studios,” he says. “I had to live this very elaborate, secret identity for at least three months.” Jennings prepared by building a series of flash-cards on different subjects to study topics he observed on the show often, such as presidents and potent potables (alcoholic beverages), which he points out was a tough subject for a Mormon.

As much as Jennings enjoyed his time on the show, it’s not the same as watching. “On your couch, Jeopardy! seems just so chill and polite, all these lofty conversations about science and history,” he reports. “But on the show, when you’re actually there, it’s like a war zone just because the game goes so fast and it’s so stressful and you’re trying to figure out the buzzer, and it’s very different.” Jennings ultimately won 74 games (an American game show record) taped between June 2 and November 30, 2004, and returned for the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, the IBM Watson challenge—where he and fellow champ Brad Rutter went up against a computer (Watson won)—and the 2014 Battle of the Decades, for earnings totaling $3.27 million. He also appeared on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, but says, “I was not, it turns out.”