"DISCUSSION with one of the best trivia players in the world, as well as an Oakland Icon and Transgender Activist."--Aphrodite Avidon, 7th Grade
Amy Schneider is a 40-game Jeopardy! champion, author, and transgender advocate. Since her streak on Jeopardy! from November 2021, to January 2022, she received a GLAAD special recognition award, and spoke at the White House on Trans Visibility Day. She was born in Dayton, Ohio, and now resides in Oakland, CA with her wife, Genivieve, and cat, Meep, which she spoke of in her anecdotes on Jeopardy!. In October 2023, Schneider published her auto-biography In the Form of a Question, the Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life, which tells of her life being raised in a catholic Ohian family, her Jeopardy! experience, having an open marriage, experimenting with drugs and sex, and what living out a life of knowledge means.
Ken = Ken Jennings, most successful contestant on Jeopardy!, and active host
Rhone = Rhone Talsma, Contestant who beat Amy Schneider
Aphrodite: My first question is just a little question for myself. So, you performed really well in the Tournament of Champions (TOC). You might’ve won, didn’t you?
Amy: Yeah.
Aphrodite: But in the Jeopardy! Masters tournament, you didn’t perform quite as well against three or four of the same people. Why do you think you did so well in the TOC versus the Masters?
Amy: I think there's a couple reasons. I think that some of it was just a certain amount of luck involved in terms of the daily doubles and that sort of thing. I think another one is that I just wasn't as mentally prepared for it. I think that the Tournament of Champions was something that I sort of had that pressure for a year that I was going to do it, and everybody was really expecting me to win and things like that. And then the Jeopardy! Masters, we all sort of talked about going in, it was a new thing and we didn't quite know how to feel about it. Whereas the Tournament of Champions is a long established Jeopardy! accomplishment, and I think that I just wasn't quite as sharp as the other players were for that week. And it's with people that good, you can't, if you're less than a hundred percent, then I can have a chance
Aphrodite: That actually makes a lot of sense. In high school you were voted most likely to appear on Jeopardy!, but I mean in high school, one person in high school is always voted most likely for the president or whatnot. And what percent of the people actually do. Did you have any idea that your trivia knowledge would lead you to your success today?
Amy: No. I mean, I did think it was likely that I would appear on Jeopardy! someday. I'd been trying out for a long time and I certainly thought that I could be pretty good at it. I told everybody, my friend going into it, I was like, yeah, if things come my way, I could win three or four games. And that was legitimately my expectation. It wasn't false honesty. That's how well I thought I could do, and I certainly didn’t expect to go on winning 40 games when only another person had ever done that. So yeah, definitely I did not expect it to be anything like this. I knew I was good, but I had no idea it was anything this level.
Aphrodite: Definitely. Okay. Yeah. Also makes a lot of sense. What was your experience like during the filming of Jeopardy!? Were there any memorable moments or challenges you faced while on the show?
Amy: I mean, it was a lot of fun. It all had a tendency to kind of blur together. I would honestly, at the end of taping an episode, if you would ask me right now, I wouldn't be able to remember more than four or five of the clues from the game because it was just so intense and you're so focused on the next moment. The memories that tend to stick with me are moments outside of actually taping, whether it's the lunches that we ate at the Sony Pictures garage and the staff of Jeopardy!, the crew that I worked with; the guy that put my microphone on before every episode and said the same little word of encouragement, who I really appreciated; the hair and makeup people—all of those interactions are kind of what sticks with me more. I mean,there are certainly a few key moments, winning my first game and things like that, that I do remember from the actual episodes. But otherwise, it's mostly the behind the scenes stuff that I remember.
Aphrodite: How do you feel about Rhone*? I'm not sure how to pronounce it. Do you have a vendetta against him?
Amy: No, I really don't. And that's actually, I talked about those lunches really right before he beat me. We had lunch that day and he was just a delight. And we all got into a conversation he was talking about, he was asking about people's astrological signs and I told him I was a Gemini. But he was just a really friendly guy that kind of brought everybody in. Those lunches varied a lot from day to day just because it's a lot of people there who were really anxious and tense, and sometimes we would all just be eating quietly separately. And other times we got into a conversation and it was like Rhone* really brought the whole group together. And so then when it turned out that an hour later he was the one to have beaten me, it was like, well, it had to be somebody at some point, and so it might as well be somebody that I liked already. And we've met up a couple of times since then. He's been in the Bay Area and we've had a drink or whatever, and he's just a really fun guy.
Aphrodite: Oh, that's cool. My mom thinks Ken* threw the last game for some reason. I don't know.
Amy: A lot of people had those theories, but to me it's just having gone through it, it's just crazy to think that anybody would think that. But people have their theories,
Aphrodite: Jeopardy! is known for its diverse range of categories. Were there any categories that you particularly enjoyed or found challenging?
Amy: I think I enjoyed the categories that were the sort of word-play type categories, like the before and after type things. I just felt like I had a slight edge on those for whatever reason that I could kind of work because it's a different kind of, it's not just knowing a fact. It's solving a little puzzle and I like that about it. So I like those categories. I think the categories I tended to shy away from were ones about popular music and then sort of celebrity relationships type things. But that said, I found over the course of it that my ability to predict just from looking at a category title, whether or not I do well in that category was not as good as I thought. There were definitely categories where I was like, Ooh, I don't like that. And then I did fine. And then others that I was like, Ooh, that's a great category for me, and that I was just struggling.
Aphrodite: Can you share some strategies that you use to prepare for Jeopardy!? Any tips for aspiring
contestants?
Amy: Yeah, I mean, I think the main one for me is, well, I think there's two things. One is just in terms of increasing your knowledge, the best thing to study is the game itself. Just going through the archives and seeing, you get a sense for the types of things that they will ask about. There's certain authors, and I don't know, other subjects that come up more often than you might expect. I guess just some writer on their staff is into it or whatever. And also getting used to just the way they phrase their questions. I think that you have to come up with the answer so fast and because of their weird [phrasing], they get the answer, you get the question format parsing out the clue to figure out what they're actually looking for. The faster you can do that, the faster you can get to actually answering the question.
So that's a tip as far as expanding your knowledge and getting ready to be able to answer more questions. But I think some of the most important tips I would have if you were at the point where you've gotten onto the show, is to really focus on the sort of psychological side and managing the sort of stress and anxiety that you might be feeling and sort of visualizing it out in advance and having a plan for how you're going to deal with it. I had a few different little mantras in my head, one of which was live in the moment, everything else can wait while I'm here. So if anything else is creeping into my mind, I'm like, no, brain. This is one time where I can say there is nothing more important for the next 20, 30 minutes that can wait. And the other was that, it doesn't matter what the score is, it doesn't matter how I've been doing.
The best strategy is always to get the next question, so don't be distracted by that because whether I'm winning or whether I'm losing, the only thing to do is focus on the next question. So those were the little things that worked for me to help me from getting into my head, getting whatever, but it's going to be different for other people. But the important thing is just that you plan ahead, know that you will be tense and anxious and that however well you do, there's going to be times when the game isn't going your way, and how are you going to deal with that when it happens?
Aphrodite: Did you also just do the average Jeopardy! contestant, reading Secrets of the Buzzer and all that?
Amy: Yeah, I mean, not that one specifically, but I've been on the Jeopardy! sub Reddit. Really the one thing that I read that's older at this point, but the book Prisoner of Trebekistan by Bob Harris, who was a champion, I guess it would've been in the nineties, I think. But in any case, that was really great, I mean, it was also a great book. He's a comedian and is really funny and also is kind of a memoir that also happens to have a lot of Jeopardy! tips in it. I definitely went through various sources. I think the thing about the buzzer is you can read all you want. You don't know whether you don't know whether you're going to be good at it until you get there, because you can practice all you want, but your little homemade buzzer isn't connected to the system there, so you don't know if you're early or late.
Aphrodite: And so nowadays you still do trivia, of course, with a Trivia Tuesday on your Twitter, I mean X, or whatever it's called. Do you have any interest in doing more game shows or more Jeopardy! tournaments?
Amy: Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think that they sort of informally said that they expect to have
another Jeopardy! along the lines of Jeopardy! Masters in some format this coming spring. I mean, that's what they said last year, that I would be invited to be part of. And then obviously there was the writer's strike throughout. And so I don't know to what extent that's changed things and when that'll still happen, but I would certainly accept that invitation if and when it comes and yeah, I'd be happy to do The Chase (another ABC quiz show) or whatever else I enjoyed. I liked being on television and the experience of filming Jeopardy! was one of the most fun experiences of my life. Even if you ignore the fact that I was winning all that money, it was still just a lot of fun and I would love to experience it again.
Aphrodite: Okay. This is just another question from me. Were you ever walking down the street in
Oakland or LA or wherever, before your episode aired and said to yourself, in a month all these people are going to know who I am.
Amy: Yes, definitely. It was a weird feeling and I didn't know, I knew how big it would be. I knew it would be reasonably big, and I knew that Jeopardy! fans certainly would know my name and face and all of that, but it was bigger than I thought it would be in terms of how much I got recognized and how much attention I got. But yeah, I definitely did have that experience of I'm about to be a big deal and nobody has any idea. It was an interesting few weeks there.
Aphrodite: Just throw out some interests or hobbies that you're passionate about beyond Jeopardy! and the trivia world maybe?
Amy: I think I've talked about how I enjoy tarot as a way of connecting with other people and as a way of thinking about myself. I mean, I think that I'm a huge reader and that's, I think, obviously a huge part of why I had the knowledge base for Jeopardy!. So that's something I'm always doing. I'm reading a three volume biography of Franz Kafka right now, which is interesting, but also puts you in a weird headspace to be that deep in the life of a very weird man. I've got ADHD, and so it's like I do have a tendency to have a bunch of serial interests that I'm into for a bit and then suddenly abandoned. So I've gotten back into playing guitar, which I did for a while in college, and really hadn't touched my guitar in probably five years, and then suddenly was like, I want to get back into that. So I've been practicing and trying to get back to my previous, at least acceptably bad level of guitar playing. Those are the main things, I guess on my plate right now.
Aphrodite: Okay. And do you plan to ever write another book?
Amy: If anybody wants to make an offer. Yes, I definitely would like to. I think that there were things that I wanted to talk about in the first one that I couldn't find the right way to fit in or I just couldn't make work. There's stuff from the first one that I felt like was after I was sort of reading the finished version, I was like, boy, there's still another half to that story that I'd like to tell, and my life keeps happening. And I think that I've always, well, I don't know, at least since I transitioned, I've always been very almost exhibitionist about myself. I want to share everything that's going on with me just because I was hiding for so much of my life. And so the experience of getting to write a book and share as much as I could, I want to do that again. I feel like I have more to say.
Aphrodite: So cool. And of course, your book is more adult based and Jeopardy!'s a family show, so you obviously have fans that are kids. Do you plan to write media that fits their interests?
Amy: In fact, at the moment I'm working with another author [who] is basically doing an adaptation of my book for a middle grade audience. Obviously not every part of that book goes in there, but the parts that can be adapted. So really once we sat down to do it, I realized there wasn't actually that much of my book that was super adult. There were a few key sections, but most of it works perfectly well and just needs to be kind of written in the right sort of language. And so yeah, that's in progress. I meet with her and she's sort of doing it, but I'm involved in the process every step of the way. We go back and forth with ideas and revisions of chapters and stuff. So that will be coming out at some point. I'm not sure what the publication schedule is, but it'll be out at some point.
Aphrodite: That's really cool. If you could change one aspect of Jeopardy!, this can be huge, like, I hate Final Jeopardy! or I don't know, I don't think everybody needs to be the same height behind their podium. What would it be?
Amy: Yeah, I mean, that one was kind of annoying, but really the thing I would say is that I would like them to cover people's travel costs upfront because they don't. You have to pay your own way there. And if you go there, you are guaranteed at least a thousand dollars for the third place prize. And so for almost anyone that will break even, but there's a lot of people who can't afford to easily put that money upfront, even if they're going to get it paid back later. And I think that that's one, at least a small part of the reason why the contestant pool isn't as diverse as it could be. And that's something that they could do to make it that way. I mean, they could even set it up where they pay for it upfront and take it out of your prize money or something like that if they want it, and it wouldn't really cost them anything, but it would make it more accessible for people.
Aphrodite: Yeah. I was talking to my mom about this a few weeks ago when I saw taping, and was just like, well, Jeopardy! can't afford that. Then I did the math and I realized, wait, you won $1.3 million and this is $300,000.
Amy: Yeah.
Aphrodite: They give away $30,000 a day.
Amy: Yeah, yeah. No, you're right.
Aphrodite: Yeah. Okay. And so as a trans Jeopardy! champion, you have made history, you've been an inspiration to so many people. Can you share your thoughts on the significance of this achievement for the LGBTQ+ community and beyond?
Amy: Yeah. I mean, I know about it because I know how much it meant to me to see trans people on Jeopardy! before I was. I don't know if I would've tried out as a trans person if I hadn't already seen somebody there, and knew that it was doable and would be accepted. And it's almost weird to say that because it's like I've watched Jeopardy! my whole life, and I sort of intellectually knew that they're very egalitarian, that if you can get the questions right then that they'll let you on, and they try to treat everybody just as a contestant, period, but still seeing somebody actually do it made a huge difference. And so I know because of that experience, what a difference it meant to trans people. To see someone not just on there, but to be so successful, and to show that the notion of a Jeopardy! Champion isn't just an almost entirely white man set of people, expanding the vision of what that could be.
I know that it meant a lot to people in that sense. And I also know that in particular, it meant a lot to people in parts of the country that watched Jeopardy! in older demographics that hadn't really been exposed to trans people before in any real way that maybe only knew about trans people from scary headlines they see on Facebook and stuff like that. And just to see a trans person be like, I'm just a person that plays Jeopardy! and there's nothing particularly weird about me. It definitely reached some people, and that's something that was more true than I expected, and I'm really grateful for.
Aphrodite: Yeah, definitely. You might have inspired me to become a huge fan. I don't know. I didn't catch you winning anything, and I wasn't a fan by that time, but I was just like, I don't know. I don't know how I got into it, actually, but I'm a huge fan now, and if you plan to watch it on February 1st and second, I'll be in the audience.
Amy: Oh, nice.
Aphrodite: It's so great to meet you. Tell Genevieve and your cat I say hi. Great to meet you.
Amy: Yeah, you too. Thanks a lot.
Ken = Ken Jennings, most successful contestant on Jeopardy!, and active host
Rhone = Rhone Talsma, Contestant who beat Amy Schneider
Aphrodite: My first question is just a little question for myself. So, you performed really well in the Tournament of Champions (TOC). You might’ve won, didn’t you?
Amy: Yeah.
Aphrodite: But in the Jeopardy! Masters tournament, you didn’t perform quite as well against three or four of the same people. Why do you think you did so well in the TOC versus the Masters?
Amy: I think there's a couple reasons. I think that some of it was just a certain amount of luck involved in terms of the daily doubles and that sort of thing. I think another one is that I just wasn't as mentally prepared for it. I think that the Tournament of Champions was something that I sort of had that pressure for a year that I was going to do it, and everybody was really expecting me to win and things like that. And then the Jeopardy! Masters, we all sort of talked about going in, it was a new thing and we didn't quite know how to feel about it. Whereas the Tournament of Champions is a long established Jeopardy! accomplishment, and I think that I just wasn't quite as sharp as the other players were for that week. And it's with people that good, you can't, if you're less than a hundred percent, then I can have a chance
Aphrodite: That actually makes a lot of sense. In high school you were voted most likely to appear on Jeopardy!, but I mean in high school, one person in high school is always voted most likely for the president or whatnot. And what percent of the people actually do. Did you have any idea that your trivia knowledge would lead you to your success today?
Amy: No. I mean, I did think it was likely that I would appear on Jeopardy! someday. I'd been trying out for a long time and I certainly thought that I could be pretty good at it. I told everybody, my friend going into it, I was like, yeah, if things come my way, I could win three or four games. And that was legitimately my expectation. It wasn't false honesty. That's how well I thought I could do, and I certainly didn’t expect to go on winning 40 games when only another person had ever done that. So yeah, definitely I did not expect it to be anything like this. I knew I was good, but I had no idea it was anything this level.
Aphrodite: Definitely. Okay. Yeah. Also makes a lot of sense. What was your experience like during the filming of Jeopardy!? Were there any memorable moments or challenges you faced while on the show?
Amy: I mean, it was a lot of fun. It all had a tendency to kind of blur together. I would honestly, at the end of taping an episode, if you would ask me right now, I wouldn't be able to remember more than four or five of the clues from the game because it was just so intense and you're so focused on the next moment. The memories that tend to stick with me are moments outside of actually taping, whether it's the lunches that we ate at the Sony Pictures garage and the staff of Jeopardy!, the crew that I worked with; the guy that put my microphone on before every episode and said the same little word of encouragement, who I really appreciated; the hair and makeup people—all of those interactions are kind of what sticks with me more. I mean,there are certainly a few key moments, winning my first game and things like that, that I do remember from the actual episodes. But otherwise, it's mostly the behind the scenes stuff that I remember.
Aphrodite: How do you feel about Rhone*? I'm not sure how to pronounce it. Do you have a vendetta against him?
Amy: No, I really don't. And that's actually, I talked about those lunches really right before he beat me. We had lunch that day and he was just a delight. And we all got into a conversation he was talking about, he was asking about people's astrological signs and I told him I was a Gemini. But he was just a really friendly guy that kind of brought everybody in. Those lunches varied a lot from day to day just because it's a lot of people there who were really anxious and tense, and sometimes we would all just be eating quietly separately. And other times we got into a conversation and it was like Rhone* really brought the whole group together. And so then when it turned out that an hour later he was the one to have beaten me, it was like, well, it had to be somebody at some point, and so it might as well be somebody that I liked already. And we've met up a couple of times since then. He's been in the Bay Area and we've had a drink or whatever, and he's just a really fun guy.
Aphrodite: Oh, that's cool. My mom thinks Ken* threw the last game for some reason. I don't know.
Amy: A lot of people had those theories, but to me it's just having gone through it, it's just crazy to think that anybody would think that. But people have their theories,
Aphrodite: Jeopardy! is known for its diverse range of categories. Were there any categories that you particularly enjoyed or found challenging?
Amy: I think I enjoyed the categories that were the sort of word-play type categories, like the before and after type things. I just felt like I had a slight edge on those for whatever reason that I could kind of work because it's a different kind of, it's not just knowing a fact. It's solving a little puzzle and I like that about it. So I like those categories. I think the categories I tended to shy away from were ones about popular music and then sort of celebrity relationships type things. But that said, I found over the course of it that my ability to predict just from looking at a category title, whether or not I do well in that category was not as good as I thought. There were definitely categories where I was like, Ooh, I don't like that. And then I did fine. And then others that I was like, Ooh, that's a great category for me, and that I was just struggling.
Aphrodite: Can you share some strategies that you use to prepare for Jeopardy!? Any tips for aspiring
contestants?
Amy: Yeah, I mean, I think the main one for me is, well, I think there's two things. One is just in terms of increasing your knowledge, the best thing to study is the game itself. Just going through the archives and seeing, you get a sense for the types of things that they will ask about. There's certain authors, and I don't know, other subjects that come up more often than you might expect. I guess just some writer on their staff is into it or whatever. And also getting used to just the way they phrase their questions. I think that you have to come up with the answer so fast and because of their weird [phrasing], they get the answer, you get the question format parsing out the clue to figure out what they're actually looking for. The faster you can do that, the faster you can get to actually answering the question.
So that's a tip as far as expanding your knowledge and getting ready to be able to answer more questions. But I think some of the most important tips I would have if you were at the point where you've gotten onto the show, is to really focus on the sort of psychological side and managing the sort of stress and anxiety that you might be feeling and sort of visualizing it out in advance and having a plan for how you're going to deal with it. I had a few different little mantras in my head, one of which was live in the moment, everything else can wait while I'm here. So if anything else is creeping into my mind, I'm like, no, brain. This is one time where I can say there is nothing more important for the next 20, 30 minutes that can wait. And the other was that, it doesn't matter what the score is, it doesn't matter how I've been doing.
The best strategy is always to get the next question, so don't be distracted by that because whether I'm winning or whether I'm losing, the only thing to do is focus on the next question. So those were the little things that worked for me to help me from getting into my head, getting whatever, but it's going to be different for other people. But the important thing is just that you plan ahead, know that you will be tense and anxious and that however well you do, there's going to be times when the game isn't going your way, and how are you going to deal with that when it happens?
Aphrodite: Did you also just do the average Jeopardy! contestant, reading Secrets of the Buzzer and all that?
Amy: Yeah, I mean, not that one specifically, but I've been on the Jeopardy! sub Reddit. Really the one thing that I read that's older at this point, but the book Prisoner of Trebekistan by Bob Harris, who was a champion, I guess it would've been in the nineties, I think. But in any case, that was really great, I mean, it was also a great book. He's a comedian and is really funny and also is kind of a memoir that also happens to have a lot of Jeopardy! tips in it. I definitely went through various sources. I think the thing about the buzzer is you can read all you want. You don't know whether you don't know whether you're going to be good at it until you get there, because you can practice all you want, but your little homemade buzzer isn't connected to the system there, so you don't know if you're early or late.
Aphrodite: And so nowadays you still do trivia, of course, with a Trivia Tuesday on your Twitter, I mean X, or whatever it's called. Do you have any interest in doing more game shows or more Jeopardy! tournaments?
Amy: Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think that they sort of informally said that they expect to have
another Jeopardy! along the lines of Jeopardy! Masters in some format this coming spring. I mean, that's what they said last year, that I would be invited to be part of. And then obviously there was the writer's strike throughout. And so I don't know to what extent that's changed things and when that'll still happen, but I would certainly accept that invitation if and when it comes and yeah, I'd be happy to do The Chase (another ABC quiz show) or whatever else I enjoyed. I liked being on television and the experience of filming Jeopardy! was one of the most fun experiences of my life. Even if you ignore the fact that I was winning all that money, it was still just a lot of fun and I would love to experience it again.
Aphrodite: Okay. This is just another question from me. Were you ever walking down the street in
Oakland or LA or wherever, before your episode aired and said to yourself, in a month all these people are going to know who I am.
Amy: Yes, definitely. It was a weird feeling and I didn't know, I knew how big it would be. I knew it would be reasonably big, and I knew that Jeopardy! fans certainly would know my name and face and all of that, but it was bigger than I thought it would be in terms of how much I got recognized and how much attention I got. But yeah, I definitely did have that experience of I'm about to be a big deal and nobody has any idea. It was an interesting few weeks there.
Aphrodite: Just throw out some interests or hobbies that you're passionate about beyond Jeopardy! and the trivia world maybe?
Amy: I think I've talked about how I enjoy tarot as a way of connecting with other people and as a way of thinking about myself. I mean, I think that I'm a huge reader and that's, I think, obviously a huge part of why I had the knowledge base for Jeopardy!. So that's something I'm always doing. I'm reading a three volume biography of Franz Kafka right now, which is interesting, but also puts you in a weird headspace to be that deep in the life of a very weird man. I've got ADHD, and so it's like I do have a tendency to have a bunch of serial interests that I'm into for a bit and then suddenly abandoned. So I've gotten back into playing guitar, which I did for a while in college, and really hadn't touched my guitar in probably five years, and then suddenly was like, I want to get back into that. So I've been practicing and trying to get back to my previous, at least acceptably bad level of guitar playing. Those are the main things, I guess on my plate right now.
Aphrodite: Okay. And do you plan to ever write another book?
Amy: If anybody wants to make an offer. Yes, I definitely would like to. I think that there were things that I wanted to talk about in the first one that I couldn't find the right way to fit in or I just couldn't make work. There's stuff from the first one that I felt like was after I was sort of reading the finished version, I was like, boy, there's still another half to that story that I'd like to tell, and my life keeps happening. And I think that I've always, well, I don't know, at least since I transitioned, I've always been very almost exhibitionist about myself. I want to share everything that's going on with me just because I was hiding for so much of my life. And so the experience of getting to write a book and share as much as I could, I want to do that again. I feel like I have more to say.
Aphrodite: So cool. And of course, your book is more adult based and Jeopardy!'s a family show, so you obviously have fans that are kids. Do you plan to write media that fits their interests?
Amy: In fact, at the moment I'm working with another author [who] is basically doing an adaptation of my book for a middle grade audience. Obviously not every part of that book goes in there, but the parts that can be adapted. So really once we sat down to do it, I realized there wasn't actually that much of my book that was super adult. There were a few key sections, but most of it works perfectly well and just needs to be kind of written in the right sort of language. And so yeah, that's in progress. I meet with her and she's sort of doing it, but I'm involved in the process every step of the way. We go back and forth with ideas and revisions of chapters and stuff. So that will be coming out at some point. I'm not sure what the publication schedule is, but it'll be out at some point.
Aphrodite: That's really cool. If you could change one aspect of Jeopardy!, this can be huge, like, I hate Final Jeopardy! or I don't know, I don't think everybody needs to be the same height behind their podium. What would it be?
Amy: Yeah, I mean, that one was kind of annoying, but really the thing I would say is that I would like them to cover people's travel costs upfront because they don't. You have to pay your own way there. And if you go there, you are guaranteed at least a thousand dollars for the third place prize. And so for almost anyone that will break even, but there's a lot of people who can't afford to easily put that money upfront, even if they're going to get it paid back later. And I think that that's one, at least a small part of the reason why the contestant pool isn't as diverse as it could be. And that's something that they could do to make it that way. I mean, they could even set it up where they pay for it upfront and take it out of your prize money or something like that if they want it, and it wouldn't really cost them anything, but it would make it more accessible for people.
Aphrodite: Yeah. I was talking to my mom about this a few weeks ago when I saw taping, and was just like, well, Jeopardy! can't afford that. Then I did the math and I realized, wait, you won $1.3 million and this is $300,000.
Amy: Yeah.
Aphrodite: They give away $30,000 a day.
Amy: Yeah, yeah. No, you're right.
Aphrodite: Yeah. Okay. And so as a trans Jeopardy! champion, you have made history, you've been an inspiration to so many people. Can you share your thoughts on the significance of this achievement for the LGBTQ+ community and beyond?
Amy: Yeah. I mean, I know about it because I know how much it meant to me to see trans people on Jeopardy! before I was. I don't know if I would've tried out as a trans person if I hadn't already seen somebody there, and knew that it was doable and would be accepted. And it's almost weird to say that because it's like I've watched Jeopardy! my whole life, and I sort of intellectually knew that they're very egalitarian, that if you can get the questions right then that they'll let you on, and they try to treat everybody just as a contestant, period, but still seeing somebody actually do it made a huge difference. And so I know because of that experience, what a difference it meant to trans people. To see someone not just on there, but to be so successful, and to show that the notion of a Jeopardy! Champion isn't just an almost entirely white man set of people, expanding the vision of what that could be.
I know that it meant a lot to people in that sense. And I also know that in particular, it meant a lot to people in parts of the country that watched Jeopardy! in older demographics that hadn't really been exposed to trans people before in any real way that maybe only knew about trans people from scary headlines they see on Facebook and stuff like that. And just to see a trans person be like, I'm just a person that plays Jeopardy! and there's nothing particularly weird about me. It definitely reached some people, and that's something that was more true than I expected, and I'm really grateful for.
Aphrodite: Yeah, definitely. You might have inspired me to become a huge fan. I don't know. I didn't catch you winning anything, and I wasn't a fan by that time, but I was just like, I don't know. I don't know how I got into it, actually, but I'm a huge fan now, and if you plan to watch it on February 1st and second, I'll be in the audience.
Amy: Oh, nice.
Aphrodite: It's so great to meet you. Tell Genevieve and your cat I say hi. Great to meet you.
Amy: Yeah, you too. Thanks a lot.
