A Hawaii resident will appear as a contestant on an episode of “Jeopardy!” on Wednesday — the first time someone representing the state will be on the popular game show since 2017.

Josh Swiger, 41, who lives in Makakilo, will be one of the show’s participants on an episode airing on KGMB at 4:30 p.m.

Swiger, who was in the Marines for four years, has lived in Hawaii with his wife for nearly 13 years and is the owner of a private tour company called Tradewinds Custom Tours.

“When I first visited Hawaii 14 or 15 years ago, as soon as I got off the plane, I felt like I was home, so all I ever wanted to do was come back,” he said.

His wife, who also was in the Marines, was stationed in Kaneohe. When she left the military, they decided to stay in Hawaii.

Swiger said he is a fan of “Jeopardy!” and that participating on the show had been a dream of his. After meeting and talking with other contestants during auditions and filming, he found that he, like many others, was similarly “addicted to learning.”

“You can’t really study for ‘Jeopardy!’ … You need to have been just kind of addicted to learning from the time you were a child, so that’s how it was for me and apparently a lot of other people, too,” he said.

Swiger recalled that since he was about 5 he would flip through reference books, which became the start of a long chain of information gathering.

“I would get a reference book out — I started out with dictionaries and then graduated to encyclopedias and, of course, (in the) modern day you (have) Wikipedia — and I would get something out, and then I would just start looking up something and then find a cross-reference and then look up that and then another thing and another thing, and you kind of get lost in it,” he said.

The last time a contestant on “Jeopardy!” was from Hawaii was in February 2017, according to J! Archive, an up-to-date, fan-created website containing information on all 36 seasons of the game show. Brandon Beckler, a Honolulu naval officer, showed up in uniform when he participated.

The last champion from Hawaii was Zelda Nash, a civil engineering business owner from Pahoa. She won more than $29,000 in April 2007.