“The Wall giveth, The Wall taketh away” is the slogan for NBC’s new primetime game show, and the stakes are high: Contestants can potentially walk away with as much as $12 million, all for answering a few trivia questions correctly and making some smart decisions about where to drop giant glowing balls down a four-story wall.

But get those questions wrong (or have a streak of bad luck), and those glowing balls will subtract hundreds, thousands, even millions of dollars from the bank you earn on The Wall.

Comedian, actor, and Nerdist papa Chris Hardwick hosts the action on the dramatic new high-stakes game show, and he talked to Yahoo TV about the massive titular wall, trying to help the contestants keep their cool with life-changing piles of money on the line, and what makes the relatively simple concept so engrossing.

“It’s one of those shows where I think the mechanics of it, if you just watched the wall itself, that would be entertaining,” said Hardwick, who also hosts @Midnight and Talking Dead. “And you know that this money is going to change these people’s lives, if it all goes well. Then on top of that, there’s the trivia aspect, and there’s strategy, and you really develop emotion and empathy for the people who are on, because they’re all really good people.”

Hardwick also shares his reaction to The Walking Dead Season 7 premiere, and tells us what it was really like in the studio during that memorable Marilyn Manson episode of Talking Dead.

I have so many questions about this instantly addictive show, and that wall. First of all, can you go to the top of it and manually drop things down?

I think you can, but I wouldn’t. I don’t like heights, and I think it’s four stories high. I felt like I was getting vertigo even standing at the base of it and looking upward. They have cameras hooked up to the rim of it so that they can track the balls on the sides. … I’ve seen the camera and if it looks straight down the wall, I feel like the pit of my stomach, I just feel like, “I don’t know if I can look at that.” We had to shoot the show basically where James Cameron shot Avatar, because we needed a soundstage that was enormous. We used these James Cameron stages because the wall is so big, and when you see it in person … if it looks flashy on television, to see it in person is unbelievable, because it’s just so massive. At some point, maybe I will [go to the top], just to say I did it, but for now, I’m content to just be on the ground at the base of that monolithic wall.

In addition to hosting, you’re also an executive producer on the series, as is LeBron James. How is he involved with the game?

LeBron’s influence was to make sure that the show was all about people who were very special in their own community in some way. They’ve either made sacrifices for their own community, or they’re trying to make their community better, or they’re just good people, and so you really root for them. I would spend hours with these people. … It takes a few hours to shoot an episode, because the wall is complicated, and whenever we’d change the dollar values, everything just … it’s a big thing. I would really get to know these people and be genuinely affected by what they could do, what they planned to do, with all this money.

It is such a potentially huge amount of money. A smaller prize on The Wall is the equivalent of the most you can hope to win on other game shows.

Yeah, exactly. It could end up being $12 million if everything went right. The pace of the game, where they’ll be up a couple million dollars, and then a couple bad bounces or a missed question and they’re back down to zero, then they’re back up again, then back … I think that’s the thing that I didn’t necessarily expect, how emotional it would be to actually do it. I think normally with a big flashy game show, whoever is hosting is sort of, they’re kind of neutral, you know? They’re sort of a neutral traffic cop. They’re there to set up the game and make sure that it moves, but I feel like I get the chance to be very involved, and I really am more on the contestants’ side than I am on NBC’s side. Like, I really am kind of an ambassador for the contestants, to help counsel them, to be there to help them.

Most hosts can’t necessarily affect the game, but you are in the middle of the most emotional part of it, when the contestants have to make strategic decisions and remain calm enough to do that. In the sneak-peek episode, you’re helping keep contestant Angel focused. You’re encouraging her when she gets a bad bounce; you’re telling her, “No, no, shake it off. Keep going forward. Focus.” Because she’s in a position where anyone would get flustered with so much at stake.

And as I said, it took a few hours to shoot a show, so there’s a lot of me swearing at the wall when the bounces would go bad. I’m not even sure it was anything I was really conscious of, because obviously none of that would stay in. It’s so hard not to be involved, and honestly, the experience of standing there in front of this massive engineering feat, and watching it happen, and it sort of looks like Tron, the effect. It’s very dark, but then these thin lights, but then the wall itself is also the main viewing screen. The wall really is every piece of the game, every mechanical piece of the game is that wall. It’s the game board, it’s the monitor, it’s the good news, it’s bad news. It really is this central, this huge thing. When my wife saw it for the first time, she was like, “Holy s***.” You can tell people it’s big, it’s this big wall, and we drop a ball down it, but when you see it in person, it’s a completely different experience.