Jeopardy! Changed My Life

learn and remember interesting facts. So in two thousand and nine, when Scott was in college, he tried out for the trivia game show Jeopardy, and he made it. Scott was excited to put his trivia skills on display and to hopefully earn some cash, but he was surprised when viewers responded not just to his performance but to who he was as a person. One of the first comments that I remember seeing was this person saying, I really like Scott's demeanor on the show. And I didn't expect that reaction.

It seemed to be like they liked who I was and they thought I'd seemed like a good, good hang or whatever, And so that one really struck me on today's show. Sometimes we just get ourselves wrong. I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of the big change. I've been friends with Scott Mankee for just about a year. I met him

through my husband Jimmy. They played some trivia leagues together, so I wasn't surprised when I learned that Scott's always been a big fan of the TV show Jeopardy. He started watching it when he was in high school, right around the time a contestant named Ken Jennings was taking Jeopardy by storm, breaking records and winning every game. Scott became mesmerized by Ken's epic run, and by the time Scott got to college, he was obsessed with the show.

He skipped class to watch it, taped episodes, and rewatched them. He even used a ballpoint pen as a stand in for the buzzer, and Scott often found himself thinking, Huh, maybe this is the kind of thing I could win. The thing I liked about Jeopardy was that it's very black and white. There are right answers and there are wrong answers. It's something that you can improve at, it's something that you can get better at. There's very little gray area whether Budapest is the capital of Hungary. That's

just right or wrong. And I think I'm the type of person that that would appeal to. And there's something comforting about that. There's something comforting about not having to leave anything up to someone's interpretation of something. You can just know the answer and prepare and you're done right. And it was the same way for me growing up in school, right spelling tests. That was the best speller.

You just have to know how to spell the word, and then you're done, versus you know, writing an essay about Charles Dickens, and then your teacher has a different viewpoint on some point that you're making, and I don't know. I don't know how to succeed on that. There's no guaranteed way to succeed at that, and that's un comfortable for me. The good old days when things were true

or false. You're already making a nostalgic Scott. But so you're in college, right, and you are now exclusively devoting yourself to jeopardy. You're not attending class. What is that experience? Like when you you become a super fan of Jeopardy. What I found when I was watching the show so consistently was that I was getting better and I started noticing that I was getting clues that the contestants weren't getting,

and you know, I was. I was sweeping categories in my mind, so I could tell that I was, all of a sudden like in the mix, you know, I was. I was being competitive with those characters on the screen. And as I started getting getting better and better, I had the thought that I could probably be good enough to pass the test and be a contestant, just based on how many questions I was getting right so on the one and I felt like my knowledge base was there.

But the flip side of that is being a contestant, being someone who comes into people's living rooms and being having somewhat of a of a personality. I didn't know if I was if I was there, and I didn't know if I had that to offer necessarily. And where do you think that? Where did that originate from? You said you you had a who was the phrase you use? A somewhat personality? Yeah? I think in college I was just kind of a shy person and all my life.

I had been that way growing up. I don't think being a super interesting person and being the life of the party was necessarily valued by my family. By my parents, my mom immigrated here. She's Chinese, She's born in Hong Kong and moved here from Singapore when she was thirteen, and I think she really valued hard work and achievement academically, and you know, any of like the social stuff and you know who my friends were and what kind of

clubs and activities I was doing. I think that was secondary or like forgotten entirely, and so I don't think I had that much encouragement to to try and work on that part of myself, Like I don't think I don't. I don't think I hung out at anyone's house or did a sleepover maybe like once or twice throughout all of high school. And I don't think that was a very big concern for them. I think they were just

cool with me hanging at home with them. And you know, getting an a in French got to conjugate those verbs, okay, very important. I didn't think that there was anything remarkable about me as a person that would that would make me stand out in any way other than I know the powers of two up to the twentieth power, or you know, I got a perfect math SAT score when

I was thirteen. I was just I. I if I thought about who I was, it was just a very like someone who's good at memorizing things, someone who's good at like knowing things. But there was no one tapping me on the shoulder and saying, Scott, you're you're a great guy, and I need to get to know you more, or you need to you need to be out in front of people and telling them all about it yourself. There was no one saying that for sure, So I

don't know why. I don't know how other people are are comfortable doing that when there's a very real chance that no one wants to hear from them, and all of a sudden everyone loses from that interaction. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it seems like your default assumption was that unless you were explicitly told otherwise, what you had to say wouldn't be interesting to people. Is that right? Yeah? I think that is right. I think I just didn't

have a lot of self confidence. I didn't feel comfortable putting myself out there with people. I didn't know, with a large group of people that may have different interests than me, I didn't think that I had anything to offer them. Really, I was into my thing, but you know, why would any one want to know my thoughts and feelings about subjects that I'm not necessarily an expert in or you know that I don't have all the right answers too, And so I was just shy and had

reservations about sharing anything with them. Yeah, and that's particularly interesting because it's not like I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, But it seems like it's not like people were actively saying negative things about you. They weren't coming up to you and saying, Scott, your personality sucks. You shouldn't be in front of large swots of people sharing who you are. Inside the feedback you're getting was the absence of feedback, right, Yea, So there was really no

confirmatory evidence in either direction. But it seems like you decided in your mind anyway that no, I'm you know, I'm smart, but not really that fun to be around. People don't really care what I have to say. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's totally right. So so so maybe maybe I've gotten some feedback in the past that I'm a nice person. But it seemed a stretch to me to suggest that I would then go on a on a game show and say, hey, everybody, look

at me. I'm great. That that that didn't track to me. M So, Scott, give given everything that you've just described, right, being relatively shy, um, not feeling that anyone will want to have the opportunity to get to know you in any deep way, why go on a game show? Yep, Yeah, that's a good question. So Number one, if you win the tournament, this college tournament, you can win one hundred thousand dollars. That's the amount of money that goes to

the winner. Wow, so there's there's a real incentive there. Number two, I felt like you would be good for me, uh like for my resume somehow, Like I wasn't doing that great in school. I thought if I if I was representing my school on Jeopardy, that that would be kind of reclaiming like some kind of you know, good points for me in some sense. So you mustter up the courage to audition for Jeopardy, right, Yeah, So I

finally decide it's time. So the first thing I did was you take an online test, And a few days after that, I got an email that says, Hey, you're invited to come to Washington, d C. For an audition in person where you'll get to play the game and you'll get to meet some of the crew at the show.

So that's exciting. So go there a month later and get into the room and there's fifty other hopefuls who are from nearby colleges sitting in this conference room, and I feel intimidated because a lot of them have better stories than me from the outset, and I'm like, I got, I got nothing, um, And so I'm I'm I'm a little discouraged in the moment because even amongst the Jeopardy faithful, who you would imagine are a little less interesting than the than the than the average person, I feel like

I'm not scoring well against them. So that was kind of the backdrop for for that audition. And then I feel like I did decently when I was actually buzzing and answering questions. Um, that was kind of my crutch. I can do pretty well just answering questions, you know. That's my bread and butter. That's what I've been practicing all these years and then comes time for me to talk about myself, and sadly, one of the one of the fun facts that I wrote about myself was simply

repeat eating a line in my bio. It was just my name is Scott. I'm a senior in college. So there was nothing remotely interesting about that. It was just repeating information that was contained on the other parts of the form. I love how the line of your bio you chose was literally your nave in college, that fact that you're a college student. It's a college tournament. I mean they probably could have deduced that that's very that's very charming. Yeah, like you weren't even willing to go

to that. I used to play the violin and hated it, or I don't know what other hobbies one might have had growing up. Right, very interesting, right, that was? That was number one? That was number one fact. And I remember how I knew something about the show that no one else in the room had known. And what it was was the producer asks, does anyone remember who won the college tournament the previous year? And I raised my hand and I said, of course, it was Joey from

Mississippi State. And I think that in my mind was the difference maker. You know, I was kind of unremarkable in the other aspects, but the fact that I was such a super fan and knew, you know, the show backwards and forwards and what had happened was what allowed me to kind of differentiate myself. And yeah, that was it. It was. It was pretty quick. Didn't feel that optimistic about my chances, and you know, I felt like I did okay on the trivia and subpar on the personality part,

as expected. And so then what is it like to get the call that you you had been chosen from all those hopefuls? Yeah, that was that was great. I remember ever since I auditioned, I would fantasize about seeing that number show up on my little flip phone, and I would just imagine, like what what that feeling would be like when I when I saw this call him through the way I've felt at that moment was was joy.

I remember looking out into the into the distance, into the ocean and thinking, as cheesy as it might sound, like all my life's about to change. My life's meet to change. I remember thinking that, And in what way did you think that it would change? I felt like like I I had been watching Jeopardy for a while, so to me, being on Jeopardy was a big deal. Yeah. In my mind, I'm like, now I get to be a part of this club, and you know it's going to be a maybe anxiety riddling experience, but it's going

to be, you know, a big experience nonetheless. And then what is it like, you know, to be to be on the stage the lights go on, You're so once we get to the stage, you're you're getting to go through the motions of actually being on Jeopardy. I remember buzzing in correctly on a few clues in this practice round, and pretty quickly I get ushered offstage and the producers are like, Scott, you're good, good job, good job. You don't need any more practice. You're all set. And I

felt happy about that. I felt like I fit the mold of a good contestant in the sense that I did what I was supposed to do. I kept the game moving. I was looking in the right direction and pressing the buzzer appropriately and answering in with a good tone of voice. So I felt like I checked all the boxes of just fulfilling the contestant duties if they existed on a checklist somewhere I felt like I felt like I was ready to play, and so yeah, I

felt I felt good. Well, here how Scott did on Jeopardy. After the break, we'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. We're back with Scott Manke, who successfully made it on to the Jeopardy College Championship in two thousand and nine. So let's hear about Scott's experience on the show, starting with when he introduced himself to the ten million plus viewers watching at home. Scott Minky is from Flemington, New Jersey. Teaches chess to who

at Johns Hopkins were in the community of Baltimore. So we go out into the more underprivileged communities in Baltimore and we bring out a table every week and set up some boards and we teach the chess the kids in the in the neighborhood there. Are they fascinated by the game? Are they really interested or is it just a way to pass the time. It's a little bit of both. They're they're pretty interested. Unfortunately, they forget the

rules every week, so we have to reteach them. That takes up a lot of time, but at the end, we usually get a few good games going. How did you do? How did it go? Yeah, my first game went really well well. I had a small lead going into double jeopardy, and then in that second round I really pulled away and reached thirty thousand dollars at some point,

which is a pretty decisive victory. And I went into the final jeopardy knowing that I had what's called a lock game, or I had no chance of losing if I wagered appropriately. And then the second day and then the second day it was more of a back and forth game. I did well enough that I had the lead going into final Jeopardy, and I got the question wrong.

So my Jeopardy run kind of came to a crashing halt when it was revealed that the answer to the clue was deadline and not headline as I had written. So one letter kind of brought the whole thing to an end. That's so unfortunate. You should have been well, good thing you weren't a real of fortune, because it turns out letters matter a lot there ut Okay, So what did it feel like, Scott? When when this whole experience was over, I would say, yeah, it was I

felt good about it. I felt like I achieved, you know, higher than fifty percentile outcome of what could have happened. My parents got to see me win there, which was like important to me, and I did fine, So I was happy with it. So what is it like after the show actually airs. I remember back in the back in those days, by the way, two thousand and nine,

everything's everything's done on Facebook, all right. Facebook is huge back then, and there's this Jeopardy message board where people post about the episodes and you know, some predictions for the upcoming tournament, that kind of thing. I remember people on the message board being like, ooh, you know Scott from Johns Hopkins, I think I think this guy could be I think this guy could be the winner. You know,

we'll see. So there's there's just like there's I tried to consume all of the media surrounding my appearance, you know, which consists of this one message board mostly and you know,

see what people's reactions are going to be basically. So then the first episode airs, and first there's like a flood of you know, Facebook friend requests, people sending me notes and things like oh wow, you did you did so well congratulations, And then I go to the message board because that's where like the true Jeopardy diehards are. And you know, I don't care as much that my neighbor from back home said good job, Scott, because they would say that regardless of how I did. But I

want to hear from the Jeopardy ogs. Yeah, what do I have their respect? And so I go to my episode page and yeah, one of the first comments that I remember seeing was this person saying, I really like Scott's demeanor on the show. You know, I think they had some other points about my performance and how how many questions I got right or how well I was doing, but that was the first line, I believe of the of the post, and it really stuck out to me

because I didn't expect that reaction. I thought it would be, you know about, oh, how did I miss this question or you know, good job getting getting this one right. But it seemed to be like they liked who I was and they thought I'd seemed like a good, good hang or whatever, and so that one, that one really

struck me. Um So, in addition to that, what was funny was someone created a Scott Mankie on Jeopardy fan club low membership, definitely, but hey, better to have a few high quality ones, right, that's right, that's yeah, a hundred true fans, right, that's what we need. Okay. I was touched by the fact that someone went to the trouble of of making that um so, so that was that was heartening. I thought I would be passable and an acceptable person in terms of how I came off.

But I just remember people saying that they'd want to be my friend, or they'd want to you know, they'd want to meet me, just based off how the episode was. So so you're starting to notice that people are responding to you, right, not not your trivia prowess, but to you. They they they like you. They're expressing that they want to be friends with you, contrary to your working model of the world, which is that you had nothing interesting to say and no one would want to hear what

you had to say. It sounds like people do. What was it like to have this realization about yourself for the first time? It was it was a substantial realization, and it made me wonder whether I needed to change how I interact with others and need to share more and need to put myself out there, if they enjoy me for who I am, then maybe I need to share more of that. And did this realization lead you to reinterpret anything that had happened during your Jeopardy experience?

Seeing people respond that way made me wonder whether that same thing came across when I was filming the show, and whether I was getting a similar response there. And so I thought back, and I do remember the different crew members on the show joking around with me during downtime and talking about other shows that they'd worked on, and different celebrities and who was nice and who was not, and different different gossip from behind the scenes of some

of these shows. And I wondered if it was maybe them just wanting to hang out and me seeming like a good person to talk to, Um, maybe reconsider that. Yeah, And you know, I imagine, you know, anytime we have a profound realization, you know, we can we can prescribe a future for ourselves in which we, you know, change the way we are. But it's perhaps hard to put that into practice, right because so much of it feels

so foreign. M So, so, do you have any notable memories or any specific memories of when you kind of took the car for a test drive, so to speak, the personality car. So yeah, I remember, I remember the moment. I remember a moment. The moment was in Las Vegas,

where I lived after graduating. I would like play poker sometimes, and when you're seated at a poker table, it's just like ten strangers and you're you know, in between hands or when you're not when you don't have cards, there's a lot of table talk or banter that's that's going on. And I remember engaging in that. And this was like shortly after the you know, less than a year after the episode it had aired, and feeling comfortable in that situation.

I don't think any of the opinions I shared were like notable, but it was things like, you know, talking about the sports game that was on TV, or talking about like iPhones. I remember iPhones were like new back then, and kind of just like talking about the technology generally. But I just remember feeling much more comfortable in my skin talking with these strangers. And I think if I was at a poker table before Jeopardy, I would just you know, sunglasses, hoodie up, just looking at the looking

at the cards and caring about the game. You know, it's so interesting you mentioned, you know, and none of it was notable stuff. That's exactly the point. I mean, the fact that you felt that in order for something to be worth sharing before all this, it had to be notable is such a high bar as a human being to have to try and meet in conversation, right, And so I think I think it's precisely because the things weren't notable, that it's a sign of emotional and

psychological progress. Right. You were willing to share pretty benolve views on the iPhone. That's fantastic, that's so true. Yeah, yeah, I think it can go too far where you know, people are are tweeting about turkey sub for lunch, all right, you know, but given where you started, yes, exactly, Given given where I started, I think I think it was progress. And I think that's a that's a great point, um.

And yeah, like that that is the difference between me now and before, where this is making me realize that things about myself maya maybe maybe this is the biggest difference.

Where it's just in these very commonplace situations, you know, sitting next to someone on the plane, like just having small top conversations about how you feel about very ordinary, mundane things talking about the weather, even though that's such like a that's such a cliche, like, yeah, it's it's getting warmer out and and I like that because you know, I like the longer days, and you know, it's it makes I can wear a lighter jacket. It's it's it's better.

I feel more comfortable sharing those thoughts now than I did before, and I think that is like freeing and and cool in a way. Yeah, you know, I could imagine people saying in response, oh, but Scott, like, you shouldn't have needed other people to validate your personality, to validate that you're likable. And I mean, it's not entirely untrue. But at the same time, we are social creatures. What does it mean to be objectively charming? It doesn't mean anything.

There's only such thing as subjective charm subjective likability, right at least that's my view of the world. And so I think it is more than reasonable for us to at least seek some feedback from others. That's not to say that other people's approval or validation should constitute the entirety of our self confidence and resolve all of our self esteem issues. Or cause self esteem issues. But it's data. It seems relevant, right, I totally agree. Yeah, I think

it is data. I think it offers a glimpse into how others may view you and under appreciated aspects of yourself that may exist, And I would encourage people to seek opportunities to find that, to find ways in which aspects of yourself that you don't necessarily think about or think highly of can be viewed in another light or can get kind of a second opinion on those things other than your own self image. Yeah, And I think another lesson from your story is, at a minimum, we

shouldn't take absence of evidence as confirmation in either direction. Right, we talked about you're having just a default understanding that unless I hear explicitly otherwise from other people, unless I hear otherwise, I'm just going to assume that I'm not worth hearing from. And it seems like at a minimum, we should stay neutral on where we fall along different traits until there's some thoughtful reflection happening in our own

minds or we have information from others. Otherwise we're operating in a vacuum. And once we establish that default, as your story shows, it's very easy to stay in that, to let inertia kind of propel you forward, and to make lots of life choices based on that understanding right when you could actually be thriving in other ways. Yeah, yes, yes, totally. You know. Everything you're sharing with me right now is making me think about the fact that our understanding of

self is often far flimsier than we might think. It's not like you had a brain transplant, Scott, right like you, you had this underlying personality all along, this lovable personality.

And I can say that as your friend, I think you are a lovely, interesting, charming person to be around, but you had misjudged yourself right, And I do think I think we mistakenly believe that because we have first person access to who we are in our own minds, that somehow our assessments of ourselves are accurate and comprehensive and reflect the latest shifts and transformative experiences that we

have that affect us in turn. But we fall prey to many of the same cognitive biases anyway that lead us to misunderstand other people or create snapshots of who they are that aren't fully comprehensive. And yeah, it's it's just making me think about what else have you gotten wrong about yourself? Like? What else have I gotten wrong about myself? What am I? What am I currently getting wrong about myself today that I think I'm right about

it? It It can go in either direction, like maybe I have a totally inflated sense of self and I think I'm far more charming than I actually am. Listeners, you can let me know offline. But but more seriously, did your Jeopardy experience make you revisit other assumptions that you had about yourself? It did make me think that there are other parts of my personality that I have yet to explore, or assumptions about myself that maybe incorrect. I feel like I haven't gone far enough down that road

to actively discover what those things are. It's at least planted the thought thought, and I accept that there may be things, and so I do try and do new things in order to try and stumble across something that I may learn about myself. And I know that that

advice may seem commonplace. But I thought I knew who I was at the core, and what I like to do and what I was good at, what I wasn't good at and I came out with an understanding that was that was very different, and I think that's that's changed the trajectory of how I lead my life now. So I think it's it's having a willingness to say yes to situations that may make you uncomfortable, especially in a forum where I'm getting feedback from others, because I think I kind of rely on that I need. I

need others to tell me if I'm getting at something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I do try and find opportunities to do that. I've yet to have a sea change where I had some landmark discovery about myself, but I'm open to the idea and I'm going to try and seek that out more. I mean, I think that's fantastic. And I also think it's so reasonable to not have had a sea change. I mean, it's not like we're getting large swaths of things about ourselves wrong. You know, to the extent you're

relatively honest with yourself. But I think the mere acknowledgement that we might be wrong about certain things is a critical mental change, one that I think is inspiring for a lot of people. Because while it's scary perhaps that

we may have gotten some things wrong. It's also exciting, right, It's like, Wow, what are these unexpected, unanticipated parts of myself that I might tap into in these unexpected moments in life that it might uncover it, that might make me realize that it was laboring under a misconception about four years and years and years. And I'm no longer going to be helped back by that, and I'm no

longer going to needlessly suffer. And what I find intriguing and interesting about your story is that you didn't go on to Jeopardy with this mission to unlock this entirely new facet of Scott Minky. You went on because you were like, I think I'm good at trivia, and I think I can win a lot of money and it would be fun. And it is fascinating how the true

change came after Jeoffardy. You know, you had said earlier in our conversation, you know, I had this feeling like I looked off into the distance and I thought, my life is never going to be the same, or you know, my life is going to change forever. Right, Yeah, I bet you never thought that this was going to be the way in which your life change forever, totally right,

totally right. It's you know, the ten thousand dollars that I won, the wild aspirations of you know, professional implications of being on Jeopardy one time, those didn't really come to fruition. But I feel like the boost of confidence I have just being myself around others is the lasting change that has endured. Hey, thanks for listening. Join me next week when I talk with doctor Edith Eager, a

ninety four year old Holocaust survivor. Edith was sixteen years old when she her sister and mom and dad were put on a train to the Auschwitz concentration camp by Mom looked at me and hugged me, and she said, we don't know where to be going. We don't know what's going to happen. Just remember no one can take away from you what you put here in your own mind. And that's exactly what happened. A Slight Change of Plans is created written an executive produce by me Maya Schunker.

The Slight Change Family includes Tyler Green our senior producer, Emily Rostak, our producer and fact checker, Jan Guera, our senior editor, Ben Taliday, our sound engineer, and Neil la Belle our Executive producer. Louis Scara wrote our theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, So big thanks to everyone there, including Nicolemrano, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Heather Faine, and Carly Nigliori, and of course a very

special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. Jimmy was recently preparing for a trivia show, right, what was what was that? Like? Oh my gosh, I feel like it it tested our otherwise happy marriage, Scott. So, I mean he became obsessive about it, right, like everything was about everything was about learning facts. Every conversation between us

felt clinical in a way. But then there was this one really tender moment where it was the night before our five year wedding anniversary, and Jimmy and I don't usually, you know, do the tradition stuff, so I didn't even I wasn't really thinking about it. He he never really remembers, but suddenly he's laying there and he's like, oh my god, tomorrow's our five year wedding anniversary. I was like, oh my god, Jimmy, his heart is softening, like as he

gets older, he's getting a little more nostalgic. This is so great. And I hear him muttering paper, cotton, leather, and I realized he's confirming that he knows all the anniversary gifts by year, because it is actually a trivia challenge that's rough, that is rough.