Mental Floss

Watch Ken Jennings Drop Amazing Facts About Historical Figures—Can He Figure Out What They Have in Common?

Jennings is usually the one asking trivia lovers to figure out how things are connected in his Kennections quizzes—but in the latest episode of Amazing Facts with Mental Floss, we flipped the script on the author of ‘The Complete Kennections,’ asking him to figure out what a set of historical figures all had in common.
ByErin McCarthy|
Ken Jennings.
Ken Jennings. | Photo: Gary Gershoff/Getty Images; Background: somboon sitthichoptam/iStock via Getty Images

Every week on Mental Floss, Ken Jennings writes a Kennections quiz consisting of five trivia questions, the answers of which all have something in common. So we thought that when we sat down with the Jeopardy! host for an all new episode of Amazing Facts with Mental Floss, we’d give him some fascinating facts about historical figures—then challenge him to figure out what they all had in common.

The episode is in honor of Jennings’s new book, The Complete Kennections. “I’ve been writing these weekly Kennections quizzes for Mental Floss for almost a decade now,” he told us. “But a lot of those quizzes, because of the ownership change and just the vagaries of the internet, they’re all kind of lost in the bowels of the web now—you know, somewhere in the Wayback Machine, they’re all trapped, like the Phantom Zone from Superman. And I decided to release all these puzzles in a ginormous new book. There [are] 1000 Kennections trivia puzzles—5000 questions—in this new book, on sale now from Simon and Schuster.”

When adapting Kennections for book form, Jennings made a crucial tweak. “We’ve given the quiz its own difficulty slider,” he said. “You can either solve the trivia question straight, or you can use the concealer ... [to] cover up the part of the page to solve a question straight. Or if you open it up, you can see fill in the blanks—you could do it hangman style. So there’s one way you can make the quiz easier. You can adjust the difficulty at home. And you don’t even have to tell me. You don’t have to confess. You don’t have to tell your friends and family. You don’t have to tell your clergy. You can just do it the easy way, and that’s fine.”

Read our full conversation with Jennings—including what he thinks about The New York Times Connections quiz, ’80s wrestling, and what it’s like to make the jump from Jeopardy! GOAT to host—here. Did he figure out what all of the historical figures we gave him amazing facts about had in common? Watch the video above to find out. You can also try your hand at solving the latest Kennections quizzes below. And don’t forget to subscribe to Mental Floss on YouTube for new videos every week.

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