Jeopardy!'s New Guest Host David Faber Is No Stranger to the Game
Jeopardy!’s season of guest hosts is winding down, with only two still-unseen guest hosts remaining before Season 37 concludes—and we presumably get an announcement about who will take over full time come Season 38’s mid-September premiere. This week, CNBC broadcaster David Faber takes the stage, but you’d be forgiven if Faber isn’t a familiar face. Allow us to bring you up to speed.
Faber is a financial journalist who joined CNBC in 1993, where he has remained employed ever since. In the nineties, Faber hosted Bull Session, a business news talk show; today, he hosts CNBC’s morning talk show, Squawk on the Street, and their monthly newsmagazine, Business Nation. In 2005, Faber won a Peabody Award for his work on The Age of Walmart, a CNBC documentary. He is the author of three books: The Faber Report, And the Roof Caved In, and House of Cards: The Origins of the Collapse. Faber isn’t the first television journalist to guest host Jeopardy!; other broadcasters who have taken the stage include Katie Couric, Anderson Cooper, Bill Whitaker, Savannah Guthrie, Robin Roberts, and George Stephanopoulos.
Faber and Jeopardy! go way back to 2012, when he competed in the Jeopardy! Power Players Tournament, beating out Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Fox News’ Dana Perino to win $50,000. In his pre-show interview for his stint as guest host, Faber revealed that the best advice he received about how to host Jeopardy! came from the show’s own staff.
“Well, your amazing team here really just kept trying to get me to be myself,” Faber told Jeopardy! producers. “You know, there’s not that many opportunities in the game — because the game is the star — to show a lot of yourself. And really, I wanted to just focus on the gameplay. But they did tell me to smile, to try to have fun, which I tried to do, to loosen up a bit. That was all great advice, to be enthusiastic, obviously, and supportive of the contestants as well.”
Prior to stepping up to the podium, Faber hosted a homespun game of Jeopardy! with friends to get his feet wet.
“A bunch of my friends showed up to be contestants, to have me be there, and then a few others just to listen and critique,” he said. “It actually ended up being very helpful.”
Each guest host has been given the opportunity to select a charity of their choosing, to which Jeopardy! will donate an amount equal to the cumulative winnings of the week’s contestants. Faber has selected the Robin Hood Foundation, New York City’s largest poverty-fighting nonprofit, as his charity of choice.
“New York has always had a lot of people who are having a rough go,” Faber said. “So, I wanted to try to focus on my hometown.”
Faber is the penultimate guest host, with only sports broadcaster Joe Buck left to go. It's not long before we get a permanent host announcement, so get your bets in now.
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