The following article contains spoilers for Squid Game: The Challenge: Season Two. Reader Discretion is advised.

Squid Game: The Challenge: Season Two depicts essentially what happened in the actual screening of the scripted television show. A lot of my family and friends when I tell ’em that I did this endeavor, they’re like, they have no clue,  so I have to explain it to ’em.  And then they go out to Netflix and they try to pull it up. And I always tell ’em, if you pull up squid games on Netflix and you see people getting killed, that’s the scripted show.

So in this show, as safely as they possibly can, they mimic games that are in the scripted show. So I got flown out to London by Netflix and the casting agency, Studio Lambert, out of Los Angeles, and I was gone for just over two weeks.

The girls-my daughters-actually talked me into applying. I’d never heard of squid games. It was actually two years ago and I think you guys [ADM] had a snow day.  So school was canceled. The girls were watching season one of the challenge (they’ve never seen the scripted show. It’s just too violent), and I was down here making lunch for them, cause I was working from home that day. And I saw it on TV and I’m like, what in the world are you watching?

I thought it was really weird. But then the more I saw, it was pretty intriguing. And so after that episode was finished up, a casting call announcement followed that episode, and so the girls were like, ‘Dad, you gotta apply for this show, you’d be great at it.’ I’m like, ‘absolutely not.  There’s no way. Like, that’s just too weird.’

And then they just kept hounding me about it. And finally I just said, ‘Hey, if you can talk Mom into letting me be gone for an extended period of time, ’cause there’d be a time commitment to that, I’ll submit an application.’

Well, Alicia [Mom] agreed to let me apply, just thinking there’d be no way in a million years that I would be contacted, hear anything back, or even have a chance.  I think five months later they came back and he started talking to me. I got a text that said, ‘Hey, we want to talk to you. Can we set up an interview time virtually?’  And then the process started.

It’s really intense. It’s immersive, meaning all 456 players, you’re all in the same area.  You live in what they call a dorm, and it’s like scaffolding; it’s beds on top of beds I was one of 456 in, and they told me that in the UK alone there were over 100,000 applicants.  And so I just got to thankfully be one of 456.

Every person essentially is worth $10,000. So as each individual person gets eliminated, they put $10,000 into the great big glass piggy bank in the middle of the room. So they lower this down and it’s literally there on the set of the dorm. At night they light it up and it just glows, and it’s full of money.

It’s really high stress. Like, it is crazy. We fly into London and then they shuttle us to the hotel and they process us. When we get there, they take away all of our personal belongings. So I had to give him my wallet, my phone. I could keep some clothing items and toiletry items.  But there’s no communication with home for that entire time until one’s eliminated.

So you’re literally getting to know these people at a greater depth than just surface level because you have no distractions. There’s no phones. And you sincerely make very quick bonds with people, and very in-depth bonds. There’s people I still talk to, to this day. One of the guys that was in my alliance [Marcus, player 021], I’ve talked to him three times this week. He’s an ex-lineman for the Baltimore Ravens. It’s so unique  because there’s every walk of life in there. The only requirement was that they had to speak English. Outside of that, there were no restrictions.

What I found most interesting is the amount of time that goes into filming something like this. There were challenges that took literally probably six to eight hours. But at the same time, that’s the worst part too, because there was one day that I sat on concrete for six hours. It wasn’t miserable conditions, but there was a day and a half where we couldn’t talk to anybody  just so that they could get the proper filming of a certain game that that was being performed.

So there’s cameras, you’re filmed almost 24/7, but you’re mic’d up 24/7 so they can hear every single thing you say.  The only time that you are not filmed is when production has to come into the dorm, because we’d have to  change out batteries about three or four times a day.

The food was terrible, especially in the morning. Every single morning except for one, we would get the little containers. It’s just like on the TV show.  They call it porridge. So it’s kind of a sloppy gunky oatmeal type thing, but absolutely no flavor.  you don’t have salt and pepper, you don’t have any of that. It’s just whatever they feed you, you eat. You don’t know when your next meal’s coming, so you just force yourself to eat it.

But my buddy Marcus, who’s, I think he is 6’7”, total buff, tattoos everywhere. Scariest looking dude. But super nice.  He ate the exact same meal that I would eat and that’s like 1200 calories a day when he’s used to eating  thousands of calories, so he’s starving. People would give him food that they weren’t gonna eat.

Something else that was terrible was watching some of the people get eliminated, ‘cause we’re all there together. So on certain games, it’s crushing. The other day [watching] it with the girls I cried. I mean,  you formed just insane bonds with these people. Then to see it play out brings back the excitement, the anxiety, all the feels are brought back to the surface.

Alicia was just telling the story. Every night when her cell phone would ring, she would look at it anxiously to see if it was me calling. When I called home after I got eliminated, they were happy to see that I was calling.  Because they hadn’t talked to me for two weeks. But at the same time, it’s like ‘Oh no, he’s done.  He’s not gonna win $4 million.’

I definitely  missed just family life in general and the girls and Alicia in various activities. The girls, being on the varsity dance team, do CoStar where they have someone come and dance with them. So last year I danced. Well, my brother-in-law had to fill in for me.  So the show comes out and I’m super excited. It brings back all those emotions, the whole array of emotions. But then for Alicia, it brings back the emotion of me being gone, her being a single mother for two weeks.  I had to put her parenting hat on to realize her feelings are different than mine.

They always try to keep in line with these simple childhood South Korean games. But under the amount of pressure and stress of it all and knowing, ‘If I drop this ball, I’m out four and a half million dollars,’ it makes it crazy stressful.

They control everything.  They control the environment. They tell you when lights out is, and they tell you when it’s time to get up, but nothing is ever like clockwork, though. There’s a night they kept us up super duper late, but that next morning they got us up after like four hours of sleep. But you don’t know if it’s night or day.

The first thing they would do is they would serve us breakfast. So the guards would come out and give us the porridge every morning.  And then before we would go into games and stuff, we could go shower, brush our teeth, use the restroom or whatever.

Sometimes there would be chores, so people would volunteer to do chores. That would be cleaning up the kitchen area, cleaning and mopping bathrooms in the shower room and stuff.  But people would choose to do that because sometimes they’d get a clue or they’d get a coin that allowed them to either get snacks out of a vending machine or an opportunity to vote people out.

Then it was being strategic on who you wanted to talk to. It’s like ‘Oh, this group over there, they’re strong players. I need to go talk to them.’  I had a core alliance, but it was like, well, at some point, we’re gonna have to choose who our ride or die is.

What we would do [to pass time] is they’d make a ball out of five or six socks and we would play catch. We would play baseball;  they’d throw the ball at you and we’d sock it with a shoe and then we’d run. We had designated places that were our bases.  Same thing, a big old ball of shirts and play volleyball, you know, just to pass the time.

There was a gal that taught us some silly games.  Patty Cake games. One was called Big Booty. I taught the girls that over Spring break.

There was a guard that actually came super close to passing out. So the guards are there all the time and they just stand there.  Those guys stand still for hours on end. Can’t speak or nothing.  I saw the guard kind of step to the side of the door and put his back against the wall, and then he put his arm up. So in my head I’m like, that’s a distress signal for production to come and get him or whatever. And so he starts going down. I stand up, I’m like, ‘Medic, medic!’ And then a guy that actually is a  New York police officer sprinted from where he was sitting and literally caught him before he hit the ground. Stuff like that would never be seen.  They cut out a lot. When I was eliminated, they didn’t really share that storyline at all. Which is kind of frustrating ‘cause I wish they would’ve.

I’m in four of the episodes,  First one, you can’t see me so much, but you start seeing me a lot more in season in episode two, three, and four. And in [episode] four,  the challenge is called Mingle, and it’s essentially this great big elaborate room.  The perimeter is lined with doors and in the center of the room, it’s a carousel.

And what they do is they’ll announce a number. And the number identifies how many people need to get from the platform into a room securely. If you don’t get into a room in time or  you have too many people or not enough, you get eliminated. If you step off the platform [early], you’re supposed to get eliminated.  So what happened is they called a number, and they didn’t show this on tv, but then they would sound like a horn. They called it a clacker. So when the clacker sounds, that’s when you’d race to a room, right?

So my boy, Marcus, the NFL player, that day for lunch, he actually got an advantage. An advantage that was tucked inside the spork napkin.  So they told him it was Mingle and the first number was gonna be six.  So with him knowing that, he knew he needed to make a team of six. Well, I was one of his team of six.  And we were the only team at that time that knew what the challenge was gonna be and what the number was. So they called six, no big deal. We all raced to the room. We got in just fine.

What happened was we were staying on the platform and before we got started, an adjudicator came and told us all the rules. One of the rules was you can’t step off the platform early or you’ll be eliminated. Well, they called the number and I immediately stepped off the platform to race to a room.

And right when I stepped down I’m like, ‘oh s**t.’ So I stepped back on real quick. And then the clacker sounded, and then we raced to the room. So I got to the room securely.  But I knew that it was an infraction and I thought I was gonna be eliminated. So what I did is I told ’em,’Guys, I stepped off the platform, I gotta go.’  Because I was concerned that if I was eliminated, I would take 11 other people out as well. ‘  Later that night though, in this challenge, I learned that they were not eliminating people for stepping off early.