I’ve been away for a little while, completing the randomest of side quests: I was selected to play on Jeopardy! Yes, really.

(For the non-Americans, Jeopardy is probably the most established game show in our cultural landscape. Enough to have its own SNL parodies, anyway.)

I’ve always been good at trivia, also known as the art of knowing a little about a lot. I’ve won quiz night at the bar a few times, with a prize keychain and 25 dollars of beer credit to prove it. The beer has long since been consumed so I guess it’s just the keychain.

With that in mind I took an online quiz on the Jeopardy website. Then came a followup quiz, then a Zoom audition with a show producer who wanted to see if (a) I was who I claimed I was, (b) I could answer questions in real time, and (c) I was capable of holding a 30-second conversation on camera without panicking and passing out. Check, check, and fortunately check.

One more thing: this was all the way back in November 2024. They said if they like me, they’d keep me in the contestant pool for two years. So on I went with my life. I quit my job, started traveling, and paid no mind to the possibility of being on a game show, other than checking my spam inbox for “Jeopardy” every now and then…

In the end, it wasn’t an email at all. It was a call. I was strolling in some park this summer when I noticed I had a voicemail. Considering how many spam calls we all get and how many of them go to voicemail, it’s a wonder I didn’t reflexively delete it. As a result, I’ve been sufficiently scared into checking every one of my voicemails now so spammers, come at me. I’ll be forced to listen to at least the first 5 seconds of whatever you have to say.

They asked if I could come to LA in a month to play on the first day of the new season, the 43rd (!!) season of Jeopardy. That’s right, Jeopardy has been on continuously since 1984. What kind of things were they even asking people about back then? Pong? Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark?

Do you remember everything you learned in K-12 that you don’t use now? Of course you don’t, because your brain dumped it all the minute you graduated. Greek mythology, Shakespeare plays, the atomic number of iridium, the 14th president of the United States, and poets. So. Many. Poets. How have this many people been allowed to live off poetry over the course of history?

All of these were things I had to re-learn. And you know what? It was…fun. I remembered how much I enjoyed learning about the world around me. Not for any specific purpose other than to understand how it all came to be. Consider it my love letter to the universe, an earnest desire to learn all of its quirks the same way a lovestruck teenager actually listens to the questionable music his crush sends him on a mixtape.

Before I knew it, a month flew by and I found myself at Sony Pictures Studios one sunny morning in Culver City, CA. For once in my life I ubered so I didn’t mess up my Nice TV Clothes. I ate a giant breakfast so my brain had all the thinking calories it needed. Time to do your thing, brain.

And….I can’t tell you anything more until the show airs. But I’ll be back with the firsthand account afterwards. In the meantime, watch me play this Monday, September 14th, on the season premiere of Jeopardy! For how to watch in your area, see here.

With apologies to the Walt Whitman fans out there,

Bryan