In October 2017, I got an email. It was a very good email.
One of the best I ever got in my life.
It told me that I had passed the online test
and I was invited to go audition live for Jeopardy.
I got to do that. I was very thrilled.
And I've watched that show for like 20 years.
I absolutely love it. Fantastic.
And normally on any given day,
if I have all the time in the world, I will watch Jeopardy
daily and I will look up random stuff on Wikipedia
for ninety minutes. That's how I get down.
I got that email. I'm like,
oh, we gotta step it up a notch.
Obviously orient our entire lives around this, right?
So, I started not only, doing the daily stuff
but I bought a children's atlas.
Ninety minutes minimum math study every day.
I'm memorizing the line of succession of the English
monarchs. I'm doing the Tony Award winners going back
fifty years. Intense.
I started watching it standing up, behind the music stand,
with a ballpoint pen in my hand.
Trying to get the timing right. Just like intense.
And I'm just all about this,
and I'll give you a couple numbers here.
Every year Jeopardy says, hey, we're gonna have online tests
and 80,000 people take that online test.
And of those 80,000 about 2,500 are invited to go audition
live for jeopardy.
Now, of those 2,500 about 400 people per year,
get to be on jeopardy.
The odds are not in your favor
but I'm like we're going all out. Let's do this.
And on the online tests, basically, you take it
at home online. It's 50 questions.
You see each question just text only. No one's reading them.
Nothing like that. You see them online for eight seconds each.
You type in your answer on a box, then it gets yanked away.
You never see it again.
I knew from researching online, that you got to get 35 out of 50
to even be considered.
If you get that even you're still not guaranteed to get
an audition spot.
But I'm like, all right, here we go.
And I'm going through, and I'm like keeping track.
I'm old school trivia. I played high school trivia.
I played College Bowl.
I did not lose my virginity until I was 21.
I play trivia (laughter) I'm in it.
And I'm keeping track and I know that I get 37,
which is not great. I'm not feeling great about it.
I'm like whatever, it works out.
And so, I go to the live audition.
The live audition is three parts.
It's basically, the first part is a written test.
Another 50 questions.
They want to make sure you pretty much weren't cheating
on the first one.
And it's a little bit different because unlike this one,
it's a video recording of Alex, and he's reading the questions
and you get a blank sheet of paper with fifty spots on it.
Now, this is kind of an advantage, because
if you're moving through these questions at the average speed
that an average Jeopardy contestant needs to be at,
you're going to save some time,
because some of them you're gonna know immediately.
You know, two seconds.
And some of them you might need a little extra time.
But if you bank that time together at the end,
you get maybe a minute, minute and half,
where you can go through, and look at the notes
you've taken for yourself, and maybe fill in some questions.
And I will stand before you here with humility and say,
that in the live audition,
I frickin' murdered that test.
46! I destroyed it.
(cheering) Yeah!
Feeling strong, feeling strong.
They don't even tell you what you got, again
I'm just keeping track.
And four of those questions, it's all right I don't know it.
That's life. I'm not gonna know these.
I can't do anything about that. But three of them,
at the very end, they had 17 seconds left, and I kept notes
for myself, and basically boiled down to:
What's the capital of Croatia?
What's the Civil War interment
camp where war crimes were committed?
And what is the element within your body that helps
break down proteins?
And I couldn't get it. And I couldn't get it.
I'm just like, what's going on?
Sweating, alright?
And then we were 18 seconds left out of nowhere it was like,
Zagreb! Andersonville!
Enzymes! Came from God.
It was like, yeah. Oh yeah!
Feeling strong like that.
The next part was - they have a little mock game.
Just go up and throw some softball questions at you,
see how you do and like, again there's no stakes here.
We're a hotel room in downtown Boston at 9:30am on a Tuesday
morning. There's no lights. There's no Alex.
There's no crowd. There's no audience involved at all.
They just want to know some basic stuff, like do you know
how to play Jeopardy.
Do you answer in the form of a question?
Do you keep it moving?
Are you smiley? Do you look crazy on TV?
Basic stuff like that. And I'm going through
and I'm feeling good. Everything's going alright.
I'm just whipping them like, Emancipation Proclamation.
John McCain.
I got a Sarah Palin question wrong, which I am both mad
and happy about. So like it was weird.
(laughter)
So, it was crazy and we're just going through,
feeling comfortable. Everything is good.
And then third part is a mock interview.
They just want to know a little about you and they ask everybody
the same question: hey, if you won a bunch of money
on Jeopardy, what would you do if you won a bunch of money?
And most people are like, you know, I'd fix up the house,
help out the grandkids, go traveling, pay off some debt.
I said, I wanted to reunite the cast of the 1990s Fox sitcom
"Living Single for my 40th Birthday Party."
(laughter)
And they were fans of that.
I am my own harshest critic. If I do something, I'm always like,
Wes, how do you do?
If I failed, I tell myself what can we do to do better?
After that, I'm like, Wes how do you think you did?
I do not think I could have acquitted myself better.
Let's continue to study as if we're going to be on jeopardy.
Which is a major commitment, cause they tell you nothing.
Everybody in that room is just like, you should be proud
for making it this far. Thank you so much for coming.
If we let you know, it will be within the next 18 months,
and have a nice day. That is it.
You go home and wait 18 months for a phone call
that might never come.
And do you have any idea what the pressure is of potentially
being - just imagine - on Jeopardy?
What's the best case and worst case scenarios
being on jeopardy?
Best case scenario - and I acknowledge fully that this
probably wasn't gonna happen for me.
But best case scenario was you go on, you win like 8, 10, 15
games, make a quarter of a million dollars.
You get to be on Fallon. You quit your job.
You can write trivia books and do trivia podcasts
for the rest of your life. Life is good.
Worst case scenario, the greatest fear I've had in my life,
up until that point, is you do not have enough money to
compete in Final Jeopardy, and you just have to go away.
I'm like, oh God what's going to happen?
I was watching the game from that season and I'm just like
the answer, at home, the answer was Harriet Tubman,
and I said, Sojourner Truth.
I'm just like, what if that happens?
What if I'm just on national TV getting black history questions
wrong, embarrassing my whole family? Not acceptable.
It got to the point where I'm just doing, like, four, five
hours a day intensive study. I had books on Bible trivia.
Broadway trivia.
I'm going through the U.S presidents. Everything.
It got to the point where I would not allow myself to go
to bed until I hit five Final Jeopardys in a row, and if you
get one wrong, you better believe you're getting up
and reading the entire Wikipedia article, alright.
That was the level of intensity and it just like all the stuff
swarming, the competition. I started meditating
I don't even know if I really believed in that but I started.
Competition. Help me. Competition try.
And so if you happen to watch Jeopardy, in July 2018
I got to be a three time champion. I was very excited
about that. (cheering) It worked out.
(cheering) It was fantastic.
(clapping)
I met so many great people, all the competitors are amazing.
It's amazing community.
I'm so happy and privileged to be part of that.
The staff was amazing and, you know, our viewers at home
they'll be watching this at a future date.
But for the people in this room, we just found out some pretty
serious news about Alex Trebek and his health yesterday.
And I just want to say, sir, I love you.
You're absolutely an institution. He has been hosting
that show exactly as long as I've been alive.
And even if you don't watch Jeopardy, I think Alex Trebek
is such a consummate professional with his calm,
his poise, his acerbic wit, his kind hearted interest in the
32nd - the stories of strangers, perfect pronunciation at all
times. That he becomes a little bit of an institution.
If you don't watch a show, he's still - he's there.
He's like the weather or the national anthem.
Alex Trebek, constant professional.
And I wish him nothing but the best in a full recovery.
And I really appreciate him and what he does. Thank you.
Thank you.
(clapping)