Ken Jennings Recalls His Last Conversation With Late ‘Jeopardy!’ Host Alex Trebek

 “Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings is remembering one of his last conversations with beloved host Alex Trebek amid the passing of “The Price Is Right” host Bob Barker at age 99 over the weekend.

Alex Trebek passed away at age 80 in November 2020 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Ken, who created the show’s longest winning streak in 2004 with 74 games, had been in talks to serve as a guest host only hours before Alex passed away.

The “Jeopardy! Greatest Of All Time” tournament winner recently spoke to the Last Podcast on the Left to describe his last conversation with the late “Jeopardy!” host in comments transcribed by the Daily Mail on Monday.

“I actually ended up talking to him what turned out to be the night before the day he passed away, about guest hosting for him,” Ken said on the podcast, admitting that they “didn’t know” how soon it would be until Alex passed away.

“We actually didn’t know. We thought, "Oh, he’s going to get better, he’s gonna bounce back, he’ll be hosting again." I was just going to fill in,” Ken recalled. “You know, he gave me the impression he always did over the years, which was that he did not want to be the center of attention on Jeopardy!”

“He was never announced as the star of Jeopardy! - he was always the host of Jeopardy! because he thought the game itself and the contestants should be the star,” he added.

This is not the first time that the former Chaser on “The Chase” has opened up about his last conversation with Alex Trebek. In October 2022, Ken sat down with Vulture to talk about how he had been called into the studio to rehearse and guest host some games. He noted that Alex’s voice was “notably weaker” than it had been in the past, signaling that something was wrong.

“I was scheduled to come into the studio to rehearse for some games. Even if Alex bounced back as he had before, he wanted somebody to fill in for him for a little while,” Ken said at the time. “A producer set up a call, and his voice was notably weaker than we’d ever heard it on the air, which really struck me at first. It was a tough moment. But once you got over the timbre of the voice, he was still very much Alex.”

“The thing that stuck with me is he thanked me for coming in to fill in for him. That just broke me,” he continued. “I said, ‘Alex, are you kidding? We should be thanking you. I’d take a bullet for you, Alex. I’m happy to help.’ Of course, I didn’t know that he would be gone within 36 hours.”

Although fans have been happy to see Ken fill in for Alex Trebek alongside “The Big Bang Theory” alum Mayim Bialik, Ken revealed that it was actually Alex’s idea to have Ken fill in as a guest host. In September 2022, Ken recalled the conversation he had with Alex to the Washington Post. “He said, ‘Hey, we’ve been talking, and if you’re serious about being retired from Jeopardy!, would you want to come aboard? Like, move to the front office?’ That was nice because I was kind of already missing the show.”

In a June 2023 interview with the New Yorker to promote his new book, “100 Places To See After You Die,” Ken revealed what he felt was the hardest part of hosting the popular game show.

“It’s the speed of it,” Ken explained. “It’s hard to overstate how fast it moves and the mechanics of what the host has to do sixty-one times a show: read the clue flawlessly, call on the right contestant, adjudicate their response correctly. And then it all repeats.”

“It’s a very hard job, and Alex made it look easy,” he continued. “So it’s kind of a no-win thing—the only other person we’ve seen do it looked incredibly confident and graceful for thirty-seven years, and we all loved him.”