Hello and welcome back. When we left our chat last week, Yogesh and I were discussing the format of The Chase, which positions its quiz champions (The ‘Chasers’) as extremely competitive Alpha-type winners…

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YR: Right. And I have a master’s degree in Film and Television studies as well as one in Business Administration and sometimes people who have none of these things feel they need to explain to me how the TV industry works. I think I have a good handle on it. I think many people have a misconception that the broadcast TV industry is about selling programming to viewers. It’s not. I mean, now there are more and more subscriber services that do have that as a model. But the broadcast TV model has always been not about selling programming to viewers but about selling viewers to advertisers.

SH: Yes.

YR: And these network TV shows like The Chase or some first-run syndication shows like Jeopardy are all optimised according to that model. Their goal is to drive in eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. They have never been designed to reward who the best quizzers are. They have never been designed to provide a pleasurable playing experience for the contestants. None of these things are what they are meant to do. So it’s not really all that surprising that none of these things are what they’re particularly good at. No one ever tried to make them good at those things. The perception that they are is just a combination of a little bit of marketing and a lot of people not being rational. These shows, their goal is to be entertainment for people who are not particularly invested in the world of quizzing or quizzing as an activity.

SH: Yeah.

YR: And if they are seen only as that – as entertaining sideshows in the way that something like Holey Moley – I don’t know what shows you have, but in America there’s something called Holey Moley, which is –

SH: We had a version of that as well.

YR: Yeah, right. It’s a fun thing to watch.

SH: Yes, it’s silly, but yeah.

YR: It’s a sideshow compared to professional golf. No one in a million years would think that the champions of those shows are the best golfers in the world.

SH: No, no, they wouldn’t.

YR: Right? And so as long as people keep perspective on television shows and say, “Oh, these are just game shows designed to be silly, fun entertainment,” it’s not that much of a problem, even if they do promote these negative images. Because they’re like reality TV; they create images out of people, they create narratives that they want their audience to get invested in. And everyone should have a sense of ironic distance about it. They should say, “Oh, this is an edited TV show designed to rile me (the person on the couch at home) up.”

SH: Yeah. Manufactured heroes and villains.

YR: Right. The problem, of course, is that people who watch things like Jeopardy, don’t think of it as a reality show that should be approached with ironic distance. And what’s even worse, of course, is that objectively, Jeopardy is the thing that determines who gets listened to. And that is the most aggravating thing about it. My actual comments, this was the main thing they were aimed at, though people decided to make their own narrative out of them. But looking at my comments about Jeopardy, everything I had to say about them was based on 1) my academic expertise as a social scientist, 2) my personal experience as a quizzer, who’s done the hobby for decades, and 3) my lived experience as a person of colour in a majority white society. After I went on Jeopardy, none of those things changed – none of my qualifications for speaking or for being listened to changed. But suddenly people paid attention to my message, or paid attention in a way that they hadn’t before, when dozens and dozens of times, I’d said the exact same thing. Because no one cares when you’re just speaking as an academically trained expert, as one of the best quizzers in the world, as a person of colour who has both experienced and academically studied racism. No one cares. But when you speak as that-guy-who-was-on-a-TV-show, suddenly people care. But they care less when you “only” won $100,000 on that TV show. Because someone who isn’t a trained academic and isn’t a person of colour, if they won more than $100,000, then they’re more worth being listened to than you are.

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Hello and welcome back. When we left our chat last week, Yogesh and I were discussing how much easier it is to learn facts about things that you’re actually interested in…

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SH: Personally, I enjoy learning about culture, movies and arts and all that sort of stuff. But sport I don’t care about. And so if and when I have to learn stuff about sport, it’s much harder to make it go in… because I’m not going, “well, what can I learn next? What can I learn next?” I’m just going, “Here we go again…”

YR: Yeah, it is fun. Certainly, it’s interesting. Again, another thing I learned about as an academic was the phenomenon of ‘Interesting-ness’, but just at a commonsensical level, when two things that don’t seem like they’re related turn out to be related, that’s interesting, right? Something goes off in your head, and honestly, it’s inherently pleasurable. Which is not something that is talked about much in this culture because American culture is very anti-intellectual. I sometimes say it takes the attitude that Victorians had toward certain kinds of pleasure, and shifts it to the pleasure of learning.

SH: Ha! Yes, it’s similar in Australia. The amount of attention sport gets in this country… sportspeople are treated like gods and artists and performers and writers and actors are way, way, way, way down the level of priorities. People will have quasi-religious conversations about sport; sportspeople are the gods of our country. And as someone who’s not sporting and is more interested in more intellectual pursuits, it’s just… c’est la vie. That’s the way it is in Australia.

YR: Yeah, I mean, I like many sports, I follow them. I admire people who are good at them. But there was a certain point where I realised that my perspective was always going to be coloured by the fact that I put in the work to become, at one point, among the top 20 in the world, in an activity. And in any sport, if I were among the top 20 in the world, the amount of reinforcement and rewards I’d get from it are entirely different from what I get in the field of quizzing. I mean, first of all, the thing I am good at is literally called “trivia”. And often called “useless knowledge”. And sure, there’s a debate to be had about the extent to which it is useless. But then you compare it to throwing a ball up in the air and having it come down…

SH: I know! I KNOW! “Oh, you’re good at kicking and catching a ball, are you? Here, have a few million dollars…”

YR: Yeah. And now suddenly, the question of what is “trivial” doesn’t really seem all that ambiguous.

SH: (LAUGHING) Indeed, indeed. I’m in a conversation with my friend, and he’s watching the footy on TV out of the corner of his eye, and in the middle of our conversation, he suddenly yells at the screen, because one of the men running around on the grass didn’t catch the ball that the other man running around on the grass kicked to him. And I just think, “Hey, I’m right here! We’re having a conversation!” But the men running around on the grass throwing and kicking the ball to each other overrule absolutely anything else that’s going on.

YR: Yeah. I mean, it’s unavoidable to get sour grapes accusations thrown at me, but it is absolutely the case that like there isn’t anywhere close to the reward of being among the best in the world at quizzing as there would be in sport.

SH: Right. If you’re the 20^th best golfer or the 20^th best tennis player in the world, you’d be showered with endorsements and riches and all the rest of it.

YR: Right. But I don’t want to stop there, though. Because I don’t want to undersell the negatives that have come into my life as a result of working as hard as I have, to become as good as I have. In terms of people stereotyping you and taking your narrative away from you, starting with the myth that you just have a “photographic memory”. I put a lot of my effort into earning multiple degrees in psychology, including studying the psychology of memory. So I can say, as an academic, that that is not a thing, that’s not a real thing.

SH: Right.

YR: But what I can also say, as a person of colour, is that that is inevitably deployed to diminish your achievements. Because to wonder why is someone so curious about the world, so passionate, so able to see connections … it stirs an insecurity in certain people. Especially people who feel that, because they are white and you are Asian, then by definition you are less creative and more robotic than they are.

And this stirs some unpleasant self-reflection in those people, which can easily be cut off by saying, “No, no, no; they’re not more passionate, more creative, more committed to learning than I am. They’re just like robots. They just have a larger memory capacity, like a CPU.” And it diminishes who you are as a person. It causes people to assume you are uncreative, no matter how much you demonstrate otherwise. And I used to think that was the worst of it… until I started facing the literal, racist exclusion that I faced in pub trivia. And the ways in which the people responsible were never held accountable at all.

On my blog, I alluded to repeatedly the experiences that I had with racism, including most notably sitting in a pub in Portland with some friends. A friend had come in from out of town and invited me to join him. Sitting there quietly, just having fun, trying to have a nice evening while answering the questions, playing the quiz.

And the owner of the company got in his car, drove 20 minutes to the centre of Portland, came in, came into our group, and summoned me outside. And informed me that I was banned from playing all of his company’s games. And some of my white friends understood that this man’s report of what happened later would be different from the way he actually behaved. I’ve been through enough of these interactions to know that that’s how it works. And so they came outside and they witnessed everything; they witnessed him not being able to provide a genuine rationale for banning me, they witnessed his stumbling attempts to put together a rationale that ultimately involved just lies. Including also banning a white friend of mine who was a very meek and non-disruptive person. But he insisted that my friend had also done a bunch of stuff to deserve being banned just so that he could dodge the criticism that he was racist. Because he was like “Well if I am racist, why am I also banning this white guy?” 

SH: What did he say that he was banning you for?

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Yogesh Raut on the set of ‘Jeopardy!’ with ‘Jeopardy!’ host Ken Jennings.

When it comes to quizzing credentials, surely it’s hard to beat Yogesh Raut. He holds three Masters Degrees in three disciplines. He’s been a quiz show enthusiast and expert for decades, writing and competing in pub trivia, Scholastic Bowl state championships, collegiate quiz bowl, the Trivia Championships of North America, the World Quizzing Championships, and more. He’s done it all. He produces the podcast Recreational Thinking, he runs the blog The Wronger Box, which is a cornucopia of fascinating facts, regularly updated, and he made news in January this year following his run on what is probably America’s favourite TV quiz show – Jeopardy!

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SH: Yogesh Raut, Welcome to HowToWinGameShows.com!

YR: Thank you.

SH: When were you first bitten by the quiz bug? Or what initially piqued your interest in the world of quizzing?

YR: I told a story to local media about how when my brother was two grades ahead of me in school, he started playing Scholastic Bowl. I wasn’t eligible. I was at a different school, different grades, but my father put me in the front row of his matches with a clipboard and a notepad and told me to just write down all the answers I knew. And after two straight years of doing that, I finally got to middle school myself and got to play and in my first game, I answered the first seven questions correctly, and the coach of the opposing team called a timeout to try to break my rhythm. But then when we came back, I got the eighth one.

I think it’s a good metaphor for after multiple decades of trying to get on Jeopardy, and of honing my skills in many, many, many different formats across many years, and proving what I was capable of, whether it was in Quiz Bowl, whether it was the World Quizzing Championship, the Quizzing World Cup, Connections Online Quiz League, all of these things… finally getting a chance to do it in front of an audience, rather than just having my own private little notepad where I’m like, “Look! I knew all that!”

I thought that was a very good metaphor. It seems people were offended by it. And I don’t really understand why. Other than that they just don’t want to accept that the role of Jeopardy within the quizzing ecosystem is, for elite quizzers, NOT the Olympics, the testing ground; it’s not the thing that determines how good they are. I now realise that there’s a fairly large contingent of people who don’t want to accept that Jeopardy isn’t the Olympics. And they don’t like the attitude of “Well, I proved myself in the Olympics – now I’m coming on this reality show and hoping to make some money.”

SH: Right, right. So, Jeopardy is a mainstream and very popular show, but the world of quizzing is a lot more than just that. Is that the idea?

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