About Ken

Ken Jennings was born in 1974 just outside Seattle, Washington, but grew up overseas. His family spent fifteen years in Korea and Singapore, where his father worked as an attorney. His only lifeline to American pop culture during those years was TV on the Armed Forces Network, where he watched Jeopardy! religiously after school every afternoon.

He moved back to the States to attend the University of Washington and transferred to Brigham Young University in 1996 after a two-year Mormon mission in Madrid, Spain. At BYU, he double-majored in English and computer science, and graduated in 2000 alongside his fiancée Mindy, whom he married that fall.

While at BYU, Ken captained the university's successful quiz bowl team, and began writing and editing questions for National Academic Quiz Tournaments, a company that organizes quiz competitions attended by hundreds of colleges and thousands of high schools nationwide. Ken also began to notice a parade of his friends and acquaintances from the world of quiz bowl appearing on game shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, where many were able to pay off their student loans and buy flashy sports cars. With this in mind, Ken began to revive his childhood dream of appearing on Jeopardy!

Ken was working as a software engineer for a Salt Lake City health care staffing company in 2004 when he got the phone call telling him that his contestant audition had been successful and he would appear on Jeopardy! that June. He spent a month making flash cards and cramming on familiar Jeopardy! subjects like U.S. presidents, world capitals, and "potent potables" (Ken doesn't drink).

Much to his surprise, Ken's Jeopardy! appearance extended far beyond a single game: he took advantage of a recent rule change allowing returning champs to appear on the show indefinitely, and spent the next six months hogging America's TV screens. Before losing on the November 30 show because he didn't know enough trivia about H&R Block, Ken won 74 games and $2.52 million, both American game show records.

The streak made Ken Jennings a 2004 TV folk hero, and he appeared as a guest on shows from The Tonight Show and The Late Show with David Letterman to Live with Regis and Kelly and Sesame Street. Barbara Walters named him one of the ten most fascinating people of the year. The Christian Science Monitor called him "the king of Trivia Nation" and Slate magazine dubbed him "the Michael Jordan of trivia, the Seabiscuit of geekdom." ESPN: The Magazine called him "smarmy (and) punchable," with "the personality of a hall monitor," thus continuing America's long national struggle between jocks and nerds.

After his Jeopardy! streak ended, Ken became a best-selling author. His books include Brainiac, about the phenomenon of trivia in American culture, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, the biggest American trivia book ever assembled, Maphead, about his lifelong love of geography, and Because I Said So!, debunking parenting cliches. For children, he wrote a series of Junior Genius Guides full of fun projects and amazing facts.

Ken co-hosts the podcast Omnibus, explaining forgotten corners of human history and culture to posterity, and speaks at college campus and corporate events on topics ranging from the importance of learning to the future of artficial intelligence (drawing on his 2011 Jeopardy! loss to IBM's supercomputer Watson).

In 2020 Ken was named Jeopardy!'s "Greatest of All Time" after winning a prime-time competition against James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter. Later that year, he returned to the show to fill in for longtime host Alex Trebek, and in 2022 was officially tapped to host the show as one of Trebek's successors.

Ken lives in Seattle with his family and his dogs.