Pursuing Trivia with Ken Jennings
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2021
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(EPISODE 100!) December 15, 1979. Two Canadian journalists are hanging out, drinking a beer, when they come up with an idea for a new game to test random knowledge – Trivial Pursuit. But this is far from the first time trivia has been gamified, and to explore the history behind these quizzing contests, we turned to the expert: Jeopardy! legend Ken Jennings. What are the origins of trivia? And what is it about recalling trivial facts that keeps people coming back for more?
Special thanks to Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs and the host of the podcast Omnibus. Thanks also to Professor Peter Burke, author of What is the History of Knowledge?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:03.0 | Hey everyone, Sally here. |
| 0:05.0 | Before we start, we wanted to let you know that what you are about to listen to is the 100th episode of History this week. |
| 0:12.0 | 100 weeks of history, 100 episodes, we want to thank all of you who have been listening from the beginning and those who may have more recently joined us. |
| 0:20.0 | And without further ado, here is Episode 100. |
| 0:24.0 | History this week, December 15, 1979. |
| 0:30.0 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:33.0 | When Chris Haney and Scott Abbott made a plan to spend time together on this rainy afternoon in Montreal, it probably didn't feel like a life-changing decision. |
| 0:44.0 | They probably didn't think, you know what, by the end of today, we will have come up with a billion dollar idea, but they would. |
| 0:54.0 | The plan that ended up changing their lives was this. |
| 0:58.0 | Hang out together in the kitchen, have a couple of beers, and play Scrabble. |
| 1:03.0 | But when they go to get out the board, they can't find it. |
| 1:06.0 | So Haney has to run out to the store and pick one up. |
| 1:10.0 | He later tells a Florida newspaper, quote, when I got back, I thought to myself, this is the sixth bloody Scrabble board I've bought in my life. |
| 1:19.0 | There must be money in this business. |
| 1:22.0 | 45 minutes later, just one beer in, Haney and Abbott have come up with the idea that will set the course of their futures. |
| 1:31.0 | A board game called Trivial Pursuit. |
| 1:36.0 | Just a few years later, the game would be huge. |
| 1:40.0 | We talked about it with one famous trivia master. |
| 1:44.0 | If you remember the Trivial Pursuit boom of 1984, it was a deeply weird game. |
| 1:48.0 | That is Ken Jennings, who holds the record for longest winning streak in Jeopardy history. |
| 1:55.0 | It was in this blue box like a way Brandy would come or something. |
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