Ken Jennings is best known for his run on Jeopardy!, an American trivia game show, where he won 74 games in a row over a six month period. He’s a brilliant man with a vibrant personality and has since launched a career of writing, podcasting, and regular appearances on Jeopardy!’s Tournament of Champions.

Did you know that Ken Jennings is also an intrepid geocacher? His passionate love for maps, geography, and puzzles made geocaching a natural hobby for him and his family. He particularly loves the challenge of Mystery Caches; if he can’t initially figure it out, it will “eat at him for days.”

Geocaching HQ collaborated a while back on his book, Mapheads, released in 2011, but we wanted to learn more about Ken, his geocaching experiences, and what he’s been up to after his famous run on Jeopardy!

For those who are unfamiliar with you, can you give a brief summary of yourself?

I’m a Seattle native who grew up overseas in South Korea. I was working as a computer programmer in Salt Lake City in 2004 when I fulfilled a lifelong dream by getting invited on Jeopardy! I went on to win 74 straight games over the next six months, which changed my life forever. Today I’m a full-time writer and professional ex-game show contestant, if that’s a thing.  I’ve written twelve books and live in Seattle with my wife Mindy, two kids, and two dogs.

You have written several books now, what was the inspiration behind them?

I’m the author of twelve books, but seven of those are my Junior Genius Guides for kids, which helps pad my stats a bit. As a kid, I was a voracious reader and always wanted to be a writer, but in college it didn’t sound like a reliable career move, so I went into computers instead. My first book was Brainiac, about my Jeopardy! experience and American quiz culture, and I’ve tried to branch out into different areas of geek culture from there: a book about maps, a book about parenting myths, a book about comedy. I’ve always been a little bit curious about everything, which means I’m not a great fit for our current age of specialization. I feel unbelievably lucky that I’m in a position where, if I get really interested in a subject, I can spend a year or two thinking about it and talking to smart people about it and hoping a book emerges. My latest book, due out next year, is a travel guide to different versions of the afterlife.

In your latest book, Planet Funny, you speak about humor and its evolution, everyone loves to laugh, but you warn about something ominous in our future (comedic saturation). Can you explain your theory, and tell us how long do we have until we aren’t laughing anymore?

My 2018 book, Planet Funny, is about my lifelong love of comedy, but also about something strange that’s happening in our modern era: everything is getting funny, even stuff that used to work just fine without jokes. Politicians have to be funny, ads have to be funny, airline safety orientations have to be funny. The new joke density of modern life—especially on social media—makes us enjoy the laughs less, I believe, and it also messes with our decision-making and our empathy.

You’ve teamed up with musician John Roderick to have a witty and strange educational podcast. What was the mission behind the podcast and do you have any recommendations on episodes for geocachers?

My musician friend, John Roderick, and I do a podcast twice every week called Omnibus. The idea is that we are assembling a vast time capsule of human knowledge, just in case the world ends and our successors (robots? alien settlers? super-intelligent mutant lobsters?) want to understand what the human race was all about. So we are explaining, say, Milli Vanilli or the French Foreign Legion to post-humans. We try to be well-informed about our topics, but it’s still a pretty light, funny affair most of the time. My geography nerdiness shows up a lot in the odd-numbered episodes. In particular, geocachers might enjoy the “Transcontinental Airway System” entry, or the one about “The Qibla,” both of which have plenty of longitude and latitude.

If you could be on any non-trivia based TV-show what would it be?

I still have not been on Family Feud, which has been a dream of mine since kindergarten.  When my little sister was born in 1979, I was so excited that there were now five people in our family—and we could go on the Feud!

Do you remember when you first heard of selective availability being turned off?

I remember marveling at the first GPS device my parents ever put in one of their cars—it knows where we are! How does it know? It was a real “Wow, this is the Jetsons future” moment for me. But I don’t think I realized that the technology for much better accuracy had already existed, and was being purposely kneecapped by the U.S. government, until I was researching my book Maphead in 2008.

What is your geocaching origin story?

I was writing Mapheads, about different kinds of geographical hobbyists, and thought there should be a chapter about GPS gaming. I reached out online to find a local geocacher, and a very nice local guy walked me around his neighborhood and showed me the ropes. We found a couple caches, including a very cool spring-loaded interactive one, and I was hooked.

Where did your passion for maps come from?

I wrote a whole book trying to figure out why some people panic about maps and why other people feel a close affinity for them. Map love generally strikes so young that I assume it’s something genetic: possibly people with a gift for spatial reasoning. I find personally that my memory tends to work spatially and that I have a good sense of direction and a strong connection to landscape—I even wake up in the morning with, very often, a strong sense of the made-up geography from my dreams. Travel can be a component too. Moving overseas when I was seven meant that I was always looking at maps, both of Asia and back home. Faraway American locales like “Delaware” seemed very exotic to me.

What is one of your most memorable geocaching moments?

I’m pretty much just remembering the geocaching joy of my children at this point, because I’m an adult human and can no longer feel joy. My son still talks about a Multi-Cache in which we had to find every planet of the Solar System scaled down, and then extrapolate the bearing and the scale outward to find the final cache, which was Pluto. But the eye-opening one for me was the very first cache I ever found with the kids, in a wooded lot near our house. We’d been living there for years, and had no idea the woods right across the street hid all these crazy BMX bike ramps that had been built by neighborhood kids years ago. It was a whole little Ewok village. To this day, that’s my favorite thing about geocaching, the notion that the familiar landscape around you hides a world of secrets.

What kind of caches do you like best?

I get very compulsive about puzzle caches. If I can’t find a regular geocache, I’ll shrug and maybe come back later. If I can’t solve a puzzle cache, it will eat at me for days.

Have you ever come across a Mystery/Puzzle Cache that you couldn’t solve?

Yes! I feel like asking for hints is a sign of weakness, so I have a few perpetually unsolved puzzle caches around town. I remember one from years ago where I solved a first stage which gave me a list of fruit…but then I couldn’t decipher the list of fruit into coordinates. Every couple of months I remember this list of fruit and get annoyed. I’m annoyed right now just remembering it.

If you could be a geocache, where would you be placed, which cache type would you be, and what kind of container would you be?

A Dating Game question! I’m a 45-year-old ammo can in a tree stump in the woods. I seem grumpy and imposing but when you open me up it’s all gummy bracelets and cute, cute Japanese erasers.

If you could geocache anywhere in the world where would it be?

I never geocache on vacation because there’s always too much else going on. It’s always when I’m bored on business trips that I wind up in some weird deserted park near my hotel. I’d like to do a little more international geocaching…we’re going to Norway this summer to see the fjords and hopefully I’ll find some time to geocache as well.

Who do you geocache with?

My teenage son has definitely aged out of geocaching for the moment, but his little sister is still a pretty good sport about coming with me. Just the other day at the zoo, she wanted to check in one of her favorite caches, and was annoyed that the lock was broken. I’ve also found a lot of caches while walking my dogs, but they generally get bored and start sniffing around and wrap the leashes around my legs while I’m signing the log.

What is next for you?

My new game show on GSN, Best Ever Trivia Show, starts airing in June. Planet Funny, my most recent book, comes out in paperback this summer as well.  I also want to figure out that puzzle cache with the list of fruits, dammit.  

Could you create a Mystery Cache that stumps Ken Jennings?