The Final Jeopardy! questions seem to be, by design, things you can't know. And so it's not about who knows them, but who can figure them out in thirty seconds.
I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.
I think I'm actually quite a materialistic person, I value what it takes to make a car or build a nice house. Money does change things, but how it changes people depends on how they react to it.