 Ken, you're a self-proclaimed geography walk. How does that manifest itself in your life? It actually impacts my life in a surprising number of ways. If I go into a room with a map anywhere in it, I'm just hypnotized. Like, I can't look away. So in a map library like this, I'm very confused. There's stimulus on all sides. I get very nervous if I don't know which way north is. Coming into a new city from the airport, I want to know where the roads are, where the highways are. There's a spatial way of seeing the world. So maps help orient you in space and place? Yeah, they give you some sense of setting. Where you are, where you're going to go next, where you haven't been yet. I like to travel and I've traveled a lot ever since I was a kid and I'm sure that feeds into it. And what draws you to the maps themselves? You know, it starts back further than I can remember. I think before I could read, I liked looking at maps. I remember a little jigsaw puzzle map of the U.S. oranges on Florida and palm trees on California. And I could just play with that for hours. Maybe even before I knew it represented a place. So it's obviously just something about the map itself, the beauty of it, the order of it. And I remember liking the detail of it. The idea that no page of the encyclopedia had as many facts on it as one map. And I think that's the first time I ever remember just the sheer pleasure of liking to look at a wealth of information. I think you could draw a straight line from that first map in a way to Jeopardy. So it's their precision that you like? Yeah, I like the sense of accuracy. And obviously that's not always true, but there's a sense that you're seeing the world. You're seeing the parts of the world you can't see beyond your little horizon a few miles away. This is the big picture. I've read that the so-called geography nerds go on various quests. Some try to visit all the U.S. counties or some try to visit all the world heritage sites. What's your holy grail? I met a guy once who was going to every Denny's. It was an amazing thing. Finally to go to every Denny's. They're all exactly the same, but I had a professor who was going to go see every Vermeer in the world. And to me, that seemed much worthier. So if I was going to pick one, it would be that. To see every Vermeer. And there's not that many. There's a few dozens, so it's workable. You talk to a lot of, you meet a lot of geography, longs, geography nerds in your work, in your life. Any common traits among you? It was surprising because I'd meet people with these varying kinds of nerdy geographic hobbies, some were obsessed with the interstate system, others with GPS games. They all have different kinds of mental illnesses, basically. But they were all very much the same kind of person. They would describe exactly the same childhood, fixating on the maps very early, liking that sense of authority when they had the road atlas and the vaccine and knowing which way they were going, even when mom and dad were lost. So I think there must be a chromosome for it. Something about brain chemistry, some way of spatially orienting these map people that makes maps a source of pleasure for them and not boredom or frustration like they are for most of us. You ever meet somebody and hear what they're interested in and say, that's really just nuts? I guess the closest to that would be the road geeks I talked to because these people are obsessed with every detail of the interstate system, the numbering of the off-ramps. They can tell a street lamp from a Westinghouse one from half a mile away, and they can tell when the font changes on the street signs and no detail is too small. They want to drive in every mile of every freeway. To me, even for someone who likes maps like me, that borders on the trivial, but they get an amazing amount of pleasure out of it in knowing the history of these places. Today with satellites and GPS and all that sort of thing, is the romance of map production sort of lost? Maps were originally tied to exploration. Now they're just sort of moving things around with a mouse. Is the romance still there? I think there is. I think new technologies might be the last gasp of map romance because you can go on Google Earth now and you can see things that maps have never been able to show you. You can see weather and traffic moving across a map in real time. You can dive through the Grand Canyon or between the skyscrapers of Manhattan. And you were discovering things on Google Earth now and then we see them on real Earth. Roman ruins and lost jungles and meteorite craters, these are things that people find, armchair explorers find on Google Earth, which scientists then confirm outdoors. So I think there is still a place for map nerds to explore. Old maps are sometimes very precise, even though they were not done with satellites and GPS. How did that happen? How do you think about that? In a lot of cases, that's still a big mystery. Very long dissertations are still being written on how, there's a map written just a few years after Columbus that somehow shows the west coast of South America very accurately. And today we look at that and think, how is that possible? You know, no European had ever been there. And obviously the explanation is space aliens. But not everyone agrees with me on this point. You were a Jeopardy for 74 games in a row and you won 74 games in a row. With all this stuff with the maps, how do you have room in your brain for the rest of the trivia that you know? I often feel like maps are sort of the skeleton. You know, like when I learn a new fact, the first thing I think of is where does that go? You know, like, oh yeah, Hong Kong, you know, and I associate it with other things I know or remember about Hong Kong. You know, I tend to categorize things by place, not so much by time or by topic. So I actually think that, you know, having that organization of the world that way is a good place to, it's a shelf, it's a shelf, you know. It's a big IKEA shelf to put other facts on. You ever get lost? I do get lost and my wife always makes fun of me because usually I'm the one being like, Mindy, that's North, turn left, what are you doing, you know? So when I get lost, she's very, very happy. I knew it was left, I knew it. Thanks very much. Thank you.