You never know who you’ll find living in Boulder. Your neighbor might be a Nobel laureate. Your dog’s vet probably moonlights in a bluegrass band. And the guy who coordinates local singer-songwriter showcases at Boulder’s DIY nonprofit music hub? Turns out he was recently a contestant on Netflix’s reality competition show, “Squid Game: The Challenge.”
That guy is Jesse Ogle: a musician, community organizer and the director of development at , 4747 Pearl St., Suite V3A, the warehouse-turned-venue off of Pearl Street in East Boulder, where many local musicians orbit. On Saturday, he’s hosting a community watch party at Roots to screen the first two episodes of “Squid Game” and share behind-the-scenes stories from his time in the show that pits 456 contestants against each other for $4.56 million.
Ogle is a familiar figure in Boulder’s creative ecosystem, one that you can typically find either on stage, backstage, or somewhere in between, holding a clipboard and a bass guitar. At Roots, he curates local showcases, mentors up-and-coming performers and helps steer the venue’s nonprofit mission to give musicians a place to play that isn’t a bar or a backyard. Roots Music Project was the nonprofit behind the inaugural that featured Yonder Mountain String Band, Andy Frasco & The U.N., Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe and 180 other musicians across various venues on and around Pearl Street.
Ogle is one half of the funk-forward band , which morphs jazz, groove and live improvisation into one funky earworm. Before that, Ogle was the founder of a music nonprofit in Durango, where he spent years connecting artists and teaching students how to turn ideas into sound.
He’s also good at playing games — the kind of person you want on your team during a heated game of post-dinner party Pictionary. So when he stumbled upon an open casting call for “Squid Game: The Challenge,” he figured, why not?
“I’ve always loved games and figured, dude, I could do this,” Ogle said. “There’s a lot of chance involved, but also strategy and teamwork — thatap what makes it fun. I’m good at games, I don’t rattle under pressure, so I thought, might as well try.”
“Squid Game: The Challenge” is based on the hit South Korean drama “Squid Game,” which premiered on Netflix in 2021, smack in the middle of the pandemic. The original series, a dystopian survival thriller television series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk for Netflix, follows a group of people who are in debt and are invited to compete in deadly versions of childhood games for a chance to win a massive cash prize. The show became a global phenomenon for its mix of social commentary and suspense, and overall creepy vibe — thanks to the setap pastel playgrounds, masked guards, eerie children’s music and life-sized motion-sensing doll that resulted in the deaths of many competitors.
“The Challenge” takes that fictional world and turns it into a real-life competition, recreating the same elaborate sets and games, but without the violence. Instead of life-or-death stakes, contestants face eliminations and emotional pressure as they compete for one of the biggest cash prizes ever offered in reality TV history.
The show is, obviously, extremely popular (season one premiered at No. 1 on Netflix’s list of Top 10 English-language shows for the after its release), so becoming a cast member was a long shot for Ogle, as more than 160,000 people applied.
To even make it past the first round, Ogle said he had to record a short video explaining who he was and why he wanted to play.
“I just said, ‘I’m a musician from Boulder. I teach rhythm, I build community, I love challenges,’” he said. “Then I sent it off and figured that was the end of it.”
The next thing he knew, he was getting emails from producers in the U.K. The process stretched over several months: First came a series of interviews, then psychological screenings and background checks.
When the official offer landed, he said he couldn’t tell anyone, not even most of his friends or coworkers. He was only allowed to tell two people — his bandmate in Nu Bass Theory, and his boss, Dave Kennedy, founder of Roots Music Project.
“When Jesse told me, my first reaction was that this guy actually has a chance of winning it,” Kennedy said. “I know Jesse really well, and he’s a smart guy. We talked about his plan, and he wanted to emphasize doing good in the world through music, and I thought, man, he could actually win this.”
Kennedy added: “Itap been funny because everyone was asking where Jesse went for those three weeks, and it was such a hard secret to keep. It’ll just be so fun to see one of our own on the big screen, on a global stage. He deserves it.”
Once filming began, contestants were confined to enormous pastel dorm rooms modeled after the original “Squid Game” set, with towering bunk beds stacked five levels high, fluorescent lights that never dimmed and cameras fixed at every angle. For Ogle, it was like being dropped into a human-sized ant farm.
“Itap like a giant sober party with 456 people,” he said. “Very loud and overwhelming.”
The rules were strict. Phones and watches were confiscated. There were no clocks, no windows and no sense of time passing. It was only the consistent murmur of conversation one minute and eerie silence the next.
“Sometimes it was really loud, and sometimes you weren’t allowed to talk at all,” Ogle said. “You’d be sitting there next to hundreds of people, and no one could say a word.”
Players were allowed to go outside for only 10 minutes a day, under supervision. Meals were simple and repetitive.
“You’re fed the most bland oatmeal every morning,” Ogle said. “You’re basically not fully nourished, and you don’t know what time it is.”
The lack of sunlight, rest and routine soon took its toll.
“Everyone got sick,” Ogle said. “We started calling it the ‘Squid Flu’.”
He laughed, but said the experience carried a strange psychological weight.
“It felt like a prison sometimes,” he said. “You can’t go anywhere, and there’s just this constant mental pressure — not knowing whatap next, not knowing what time it is. It messes with your head.”
He added: “Both the production and the contestants take the game so seriously. For anyone who thinks reality TV is all scripted … well, maybe some are, but this one is definitely not.”
Ogle didn’t show up unprepared. Long before filming began, he’d already started practicing a few of the games he suspected might appear.
“I had a feeling some of the traditional Korean children’s games would come back,” he said. “So I bought one of them online, called Gong-gi, and practiced for months.”
That attention to rhythm and repetition ended up saving hundreds of players in the show’s first challenge, “The Count,” where contestants had to press a buzzer exactly 456 seconds after a starting signal. The room closer to the correct time survived. The other half was eliminated.
Ogle immediately volunteered.
“I said, ‘Hey, I’m a musician. I know 60 beats per minute like the back of my hand. I’ve got this,’” he said.
Another musician and a rapper joined him, and together they built a system.
“We decided we’d have two of us clapping, a few people silently counting and one person counting out loud,” Ogle said. “I told them, ‘I teach rhythm all the time, so I knew how to keep a steady tempo. The song ‘Wish You Were Here,’ by Pink Floyd, is exactly 60 beats per minute, and I also have my own version of the song at 120 beats per minute. I can clap accurately to this.’”
The plan was to stop just shy of the target time to avoid going over.
“We decided to stop at about 454 seconds,” he said. When the results came in, their timing was nearly perfect.
“We were within 2 seconds, exactly what we aimed for,” Ogle said. “We clapped the time perfectly, which almost no one can do, especially under that kind of pressure. We saved our entire team and eliminated the other group. It directly related to music, which is crazy.”
Later, watching the episode, he noticed that the moment was edited differently.
“You can see us clapping, but they kind of give the credit to one musician,” Ogle said, laughing. “They wanted more drama, I guess. But I was right there in the center. We saved everyone.”
He carried that mindset through the next rounds, including a six-legged relay that tied teammates together as they raced through a series of playground challenges. His preparation paid off again: “Our team just smoked everybody,” he said.
The following challenge didn’t end quite as well.
“My death was pretty epic,” Ogle said. “I’m on the screen in slow motion, diving for this ball and missing it.”
Even after he left the game, the experience stuck with him in unexpected ways.
“It affected me way more than I thought it would,” he said. “I’d find myself thinking about it all the time, dreaming about what I could’ve done differently.”
When he got back to Colorado, he poured that energy into music. He recorded a new version of Pink Floyd’s “” and recorded it with Nu Bass Theory.
“It just felt right,” he said. “That song was part of how I got through the first round, so it became kind of symbolic afterward.”
Back in Boulder, Ogle is once again surrounded by instruments instead of bunk beds, preparing for a slightly less stressful event: Saturday nightap community watch party at Roots Music Project.“I just thought it would be fun to share it with everyone here,” he said. “Roots has this big sound system and a projector, and itap really about community anyway — it felt right to make it a shared experience instead of just watching at home.”
The two-hour event will screen the first two episodes of “Squid Game: The Challenge,” followed by a short Q&A where Ogle will talk about what itap like to navigate one of reality TV’s most elaborate social experiments.
For him, the experience felt less like a stunt and more like a study in human behavior.
“Itap the biggest social experiment you can imagine,” he said. “You see how people react when they’re hungry, tired, under pressure. Everyone wants the same thing, but you start realizing how different people’s motivations are.”
In that way, the show wasn’t all that different from a jam session.
“Music literally saved my team in that first round,” Ogle said. “And honestly, thatap what music does — it connects people, keeps you in rhythm with each other, even when everything feels chaotic.”
Kennedy sees it the same way.
“If you’re a musician today, there’s no clear path to making it,” Kennedy said. “You have to experiment, take risks, and say yes to things you can’t predict. Thatap exactly what Jesse did. He treated it like another creative project.”
At 6 p.m. Saturday, anyone is invited to join Ogle and the Roots crew for a “Squid Game: The Challenge” watch party at Roots Music Project. The evening will feature a screening of the first two episodes, plus behind-the-scenes stories from Ogle about what it was actually like to live through the games – from the counting, the craziness, even the bland oatmeal.
