Ken Jennings will admit that during his record-setting Jeopardy run of 74 straight wins in 2004, he lied to Alex Trebek. It was about airline food. The host was interviewing him after the show's first commercial break, and by that point — Ken Jennings can't remember exactly when it was, at what point in the 1,800 minutes or so of airtime he occupied — but by that point, Ken Jennings had, through the necessity of the show's format, affably surrendered just about all of the harmless personal factoids he had to offer. So Ken Jennings told Alex Trebek that he liked airline food.

Ken Jennings told Alex Trebek that he liked airline food, even though he doesn't, or more accurately, even though he doesn't have an opinion on it one way or another, because Ken Jennings understood the rhythm of the Jeopardy dance: Liking airline food is peculiar; liking airline food would be fodder for that signature Alex Trebek brand of humor, half eye-rolling dismissal and half knowing nod to the audience — like, of course he likes airline food, folks, this is a Jeopardy contestant. And sure enough, Alex Trebek raised his eyebrows at Ken Jennings, Ken Jennings further sculpted his role as the goofy savant who'd become Alex Trebek's foil, and the most memorable stint in the history of American game shows rolled on, unabated, possibly unstoppable.

On Jeopardy, knowledge begets money, but the money is beside the point, just a unit of scorekeeping. The contestants themselves are usually beside the point too, those personal anecdotes taking up no more than 10% of the show's airtime, the rest reserved for a game of the mind — unusual in an America gleefully painted by itself and the rest of the world as a greedy, anti-intellectual society. It isn't reality TV, no personalities or rivalries, just a few good strivers engaging in brain competition, and you at home playing along with them. Jeopardy is both elitist and all-inclusive. Alex Trebek is its nominal star, but the real star is the idea that being smart alone is worth something, even if you're the kind of social oddball who likes airline food.

Ken Jennings transcended the show by being the epitome of the show. Jennings — Ken Jennings to America, that type of name you can't help but pronounce in full, to the extent that even his then 2-year-old son would call him Ken Jennings during his six-month run — became a celebrity in a celebrity-free zone. If Trebek is the show's Virgil, Jennings is Dante, the one guy who made it out alive. Even if you're the kind of person who knows that the Tournament of Champions, the show's annual best-of-the-best showdown, started yesterday, we bet you that you can't name another Jeopardy contestant. (OK — except for Leonard, the daring and daringly Afroed Teen Tournament champ who became a star Tuesday night.)

But you know Ken Jennings — and Jennings, the onetime programmer of health-care software, is taking advantage of your familiarity to this day, publishing nonfiction books, writing a weekly news quiz for Slate, writing a weekly column about obscure world destinations for Condé Nast Traveler, debunking myths for Woot.com, creating a trivia puzzle for Parade magazine and one-offs for sites like ESPN's Grantland, tweeting a handful of times a day, and doing whatever else he can to keep rolling in his career as a professional smart person. In 2013, merely knowing a bunch of arcane stuff isn't enough to impress anyone outside of a pub quiz — that's what our phones are for. But parlaying both intelligence and effortless charisma into not just celebrity but also a seemingly permanent spot in the pop-culture landscape is a pretty specific hustle. Don't let the clean-cut Mormon good looks or aw-shucks demeanor fool you: Ken Jennings is on the grind.

I meet Jennings in a coffee shop near Union Square in New York City, a continent away from his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife, Mindy, and two children. He is here to work, promoting his new book, Because I Said So, the fourth he's written since his $2,522,700 in winnings — plus the promise of future income via speaking, writing, and special Jeopardy stints — allowed him to quit his job as a software engineer in Salt Lake City. His current job description is emblematic of the social media age: Being himself, for fun and profit. Which means being more than a little self-aware.

"I sort of peaked before I was 30," he says, laughing. His laugh is kind of a literal ha-ha, rolling tonally upward in a way that fits his peppy character. "It's already guaranteed that it'll say Jeopardy on my tombstone."

In a dark suit and a pale blue dress shirt, wheat-colored hair pushed sideways, Jennings is technically 38, yet seems an ageless carbon-copy of the figure he cut for six months on television — he could've just walked off the 2004 Jeopardy set. He does nothing to dispel the sense of his character as it appeared on TV: both polished and shticky without being overly guarded. As we talk, he uncoils from being well-postured, even rigid, to more languid and casually at ease.