As you may have heard, James Holzhauer is thoroughly dominating Jeopardy!. He’s setting records, bringing home cash, and provoking the predictable backlash that comes whenever anybody is better at something than everyone else has been in history.
I’m not here to add to that backlash. It’s great that James Holzhauer knows who the patron saint of wheelwrights is, and knows CBS fired the Smothers Brothers the same year we went to the moon, and knows not only that Garcia Lorca existed but also what he did and how he died. It’s great that he trained himself to buzz in at the perfect time every time. It’s great that he’s revolutionizing a game as old as Jeopardy! by exploiting huge inefficiencies related to how Daily Doubles are found and wagered upon. It’s great for James Holzhauer. It’s great for Jeopardy!. It’s great for those of us who want our news sources talking about things other than petty political bickering.
No, my concern doesn’t lie in what James Holzhauer is doing on Jeopardy!. In fact, I hope he keeps winning Jeopardy! forever. What I’m worried about is what happens when James Holzhauer stops winning Jeopardy!. Because what really worries me is that James Holzhauer might know too much.
We went over this with the NSA five or six years ago, when Teddy Snowden blew the roof off the whistle-blowing industry and made us all briefly mortified, until the news cycle moved on and nothing changed but we all agreed it wasn’t worth the fuss of fighting it too hard. We go over it now and then with tech companies, until, again, the news cycle moves on and we collectively decide we like the services of those tech companies enough to let them know everything about us.
But soon enough, we’ll have to go over it with James Holzhauer, because this man’s knowledge and overall competence imply he may know more about us than we want him to know.
After all, if James Holzhauer knows Honey Boo Boo’s real name, how do we know he doesn’t know our real names, and all those other things we think we hide? Does James Holzhauer know I’m mildly afraid of heights? Does James Holzhauer know that in fourth grade, I was too intimidated by a project in art class to even know where to start, so I just didn’t do it? Does James Holzhauer know that I ate a lot of fiber yesterday, which led to me having a panicked ten minutes this morning in which I had to finish a Lyft ride, cancel the next one, and gasp a hurried plea at the Chick-Fil-A walk-up window for them to open their bathroom to me?
The point is, James Holzhauer seems capable of possibly knowing everything, and everything is a large quantity of things.
Keep an eye on that guy.
