Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - hq trivia and the quiz daddy

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

In 2017, HQ Trivia was the app to rule them all, nearly the heir apparent to Jeopardy! Millions of people would stop what they were doing every day to answer trivia for absurdly small cash prizes, most often from "Quiz Daddy" Scott Rogowsky. Less than a year and a half later, it was over -- but not before a broadcast with The Rock, a weirdly specific salad-based threat from a founder, and a tragic death took place. So... what happened? Jamie takes the bus to Scott Rogowsky's storage unit in Marina Del Rey to find out. (Interview has been edited for length and clarity!) Shop at Quiz Daddy's here: https://quizdaddys.com/ Follow Scott Rogowsky: https://www.instagram.com/scottrogowsky/ https://twitter.com/ScottRogowsky Boom/Bust podcast: https://www.theringer.com/boom-bust-podcast Jamie's cursed leeches video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-ZZbBZW2es&t=453s Follow Sarah Prebis for her HQ TikTokumentary & more: https://www.tiktok.com/@sarahpribisSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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What if I told you that at one point in time, Warner Brothers was paying young comedians to lock themselves in a room on a live stream for 12 hours, take so many edibles they ended up in the hospital, and get colonics on screen, all in the pursuit of creating a viral video. Because my friends, that was true. I was there. I was the girl that got the colonic. Because for as long as videos have existed on the internet, even before the very first YouTube video. All right, so here we are, one of the elephants. Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long fun. Shout out to the cinematic classic, me at the zoo. Since the dawn of the online video, there has been,

cursed video content. And every era of cursed video content has its own flavor. The time I'm talking about, my trash is from the late 2010s. A little after BuzzFeed pioneered the underpay a 20-something comedian to react to something on screen. This is the tried and true Disney princess reaction format. I know that it's pretty ridiculous to blame Disney for people's body image issues, but when you think about it, it isn't that crazy. And my time came shortly after Vine, the six-second video app that becomes extremely relevant in today's episode extremely soon. The late 2010's cursed content comes shortly before the true explosion of TikTok.

These few years of videos were often bankrolled by huge companies in a too late attempt to meaningfully get in on the money to be had in online video, specifically on YouTube and, weird as it might sound now, video on Facebook. These videos were professionally shot and edited, but were so low budget and made with mostly untested talent that they sort of looked like diet versions of content that existed on TV already. If you only cooked a TV show in the microwave halfway, there were a lot of models like this. There were companies like Mike and Vice, which funded short documentaries that boiled down to, hey, this person don't belong in this place. No shade. I did a million things like this. And there were places like where I worked at a vertical called Super Deluxe, where I co-hosted a show

called Upgraded, where my co-host and I would get the most disgusting and controversial beauty treatments in L.A. on screen and just see if they killed us. And they almost did. I once had to tape a diaper to my torso for three days while waiting for my blood to clot after a woman who was not a doctor put leeches all over my body in a basement in Brentwood. I was paid $75 to do this before taxes. How many leeches are in my belly button? Right now, only one. Just one. They're going to town. They will improve circulation to the tissue. But it was fun. It was messy. It was just professional enough to make it clear that there was a crew, but not professional enough to make it feel like it belonged anywhere except on the internet. It's not every day that you're

discovered eating dog food on stage at a stand-up show and I then offered a job making videos that got millions of views. Except, okay, did they get millions of views? The jury's kind of out on that. Because at least on Facebook, the answer was absolutely not. The view numbers on this and most videos turned out to be pretty fake. But by the time that information became public knowledge, it was already too late. We had already, and I can feel the throats of thousands of laid-off millennial journalists catching, we had already pivoted to video. Oh, hey, I have an idea. Yeah, hit me with it, Tony. How about if we pivot to video? That was Tony Hawk for some reason.

The pivot to video. God, fuck the pivot to video. Anyone working in media during this stretch of years was furious about the pivot to video. Such a reviled era of the internet that it has its own Wikipedia page. The pivot to video is expanded on in gruesome detail in friend of the show Max Fisher's book, The Chaos Machine. But it boils down to this. In 2015, Facebook made the claim that video was the future and that the majority, majority of content that did well on the site were no longer the linked pieces and photos that

the platform was known for at the time. Advertisers being advertisers and the media landscape being on pretty thin ice, people listened. So by 2016, every Facebook executive was leading with video. That spring, college pervert turned adult milk carton Mark Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News the following. We're entering this new golden age of video. I wouldn't be surprised if you fast forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video. And particularly at this time, Facebook is the biggest game in town. So advertisers took this very seriously. And it led to big media companies like Vice, Mashable, and Mike to lay off journalists and their editors to make way for this

pivot to video. Right at a moment when reliable journalism was needed on social media the most. Maybe you remember there was an election in 2016 that really could have used some reliable journalism. And what's worse, all of these journalists lost their job for no reason because, drum roll please. The pivot to video was based on a lie. What Mark Zuckerberg was saying there was not true. Facebook was lying, can you believe it? But at this time, Facebook lying was a bit of a shock to the average. user. In 2016, a lot of people still thought that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were cool.

It's embarrassing, but I refuse to let my generation forget. So the year after Zuckerberg says everyone's watching video, five years until we're only doing video. Suzanne Veronica at the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook had been overestimating their video numbers for the better part of two years. And Facebook was forced to fess up to this. They admitted in a public post from Vice President of Business and Marketing David Fisher that they'd been lying about viewership times by as much as 60 to 80 percent. But okay, they admitted it. Problem solved, right? Well, no, because even in their admission, Facebook is still lying. In 2016, Facebook says, oops are bad, and the media doesn't really panic in the way you might expect.

So the pivot to video chugs along through 2017, because advertisers were assured the glitch was fixed. Major publishers like The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and Sports Illustrated all start foregoing articles and turning them into cheap video content instead. Some were as basic as animated slideshows that summarized more detailed reporting. Fox Sports and MTV News nuked their entire writing teams. And this was an extension of the slow and painful decline of well-funded American journalism, a problem that has only continued to grow worse. I'm sorry, Amazon owns your undefined. biased newspaper? You're listening to a show on IHeart Radio, but nothing really reaches ahead until 2018. When evidence is released in court that all but confirms that Facebook was knowingly

lying to advertisers, impacting the state of journalism online on purpose. Now the public gets mad. The video viewership numbers were juiced and the pivot to video served no one, including Facebook. And so my era of trash videos online, this corporate-sponsored video, starts to go away, as it slowly becomes clear that Facebook hadn't just found out about this problem, but likely were aware of it back when Zuckerberg made the original five years to video comments. But it's cold comfort. By the time Facebook is caught red-handed, the newsroom layoffs have already happened, and the video revenue streams that had been put in their place were forced to struggle with the new reality that, well, maybe not a lot of people were

actually watching our videos. Media companies started to close. It's overly simplistic to say that this lie lost journalists their jobs so that I could get paid $75 to have bull seamen squeezed on my face to see if it hurt, but unfortunately, it's pretty close to the truth. The video vertical I worked at was shut down after a corporate merger between Warner Brothers and AT&T, but what pivot to video came to mean was a company's last-ditch effort at survival based on faulty Silicon Valley info before leaning into layoffs. It was over, whatever it was.

And during this same, strange, post-vine pre-COVID era of video, one of the most successful Flash in the Pan video apps rose and fell. I'm talking about HQ trivia. Now, you either just gasped in recognition or were like, huh, I've never heard of it. I truly have not encountered an in-between reaction to HQ trivia. If you didn't know, HQ trivia was an interactive video trivia game made by the guys who founded and subsequently fumbled Vine,

an app that caused millions of users to stop what they were doing and watch as host Scott Rogowski, who called himself QuizDaddy, ask five questions. Is this your first time stepping into the ring with us at HQ? I want it to be a good, clean fight, all right? Nothing below the belt. Also, wash your hands. Seriously.

All right, let's go over the rules. I'm going to have 12 questions for you. You have three options for each question. You have 10 seconds to answer the question after I start reading the question. If you get that question right, you move on in the next round, make it to the end. Answering all questions correctly, you win or split the prize. And if you got them right, you could win an actual cash prize, though that prize was usually pretty small. It wasn't about the money.

It was the rare piece of video content that was actually interactive and fun. People freaked out over this. Here's a video of a woman winning $11 on HQ trivia in January 2018. This young woman is going bananas. 32-year-old Lauren May just won a trivia game on her iPhone. An HQ is often lumped in with this era of fancily bankrolled, semi-professional-looking video entertainment in the back half of the 2010s. It was massively popular,

and, like most of the other video efforts I described, that cratered during the pivot to video, had sputtered into oblivion by the time COVID lockdown began in the spring of 2020. But is it really fair to lump in HQ trivia with this? Were they really a casualty of things like the algorithm, massive corporate shakedowns, and the fleeting interests of internet users? Honestly, it's far messier than that. When you peel back the layers, HQ trivia was run chaotically,

catastrophically badly, leaving employees and fans to mourn what many of them still think could have been the 21st century's Jeopardy. And no one feels this more strongly than Quiz Daddy himself, Scott Rogowski. HQ trivia and the Quiz Daddy, your 16th minute starts now. Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame

One more minute of me I'm not so bad when you're thinking of my mind Another character to say so goodbye All right. Ancient internet users, we did it. We found a way to talk about Vine, an app that burned so briefly and beautifully that most people still remember it fondly. It never even had a chance to get evil. To this day, when I'm having a shitty day, I will sometimes turn on an old Vine compilation at my apartment. It's like a millennial Yule log. And like any video platform, Vine became a home for some of the most rancid video comedy you can think of, but it was also the home of some of my favorite clips of all time. Stories I want to cover on this show. And they were roommates. Oh my God, they were roommates. Dream episode. Please DM me. Vine was around for almost exactly four years, 2013 to 2017, and the app where users posted six-second video clips ended up launching social media personalities and genuine crossover successes

who are well known today. Whether we like it or not, on the chaotic evil side, Vine launched the Paul brothers and David Dobrick, and on the fun side, my friend Demia Didiube, one of the funniest people on the planet. Vine launched now iconic YouTubers whose work I love, like Drew Gooden, Danny Gonzalez, Liza Koshy, also Sean Mendez got his start on Vine. I feel like he wants us to forget that, but we can't. But one of the things Vine didn't do well is make their most famous users loyal to the app. In fact, as a chapter of Taylor Lorenz's extremely online gets into, Vine was often openly hostile to a its biggest creators. And so many found it a no-brainer to jump ship to platforms more willing to

embrace and fairly compensate them. And the story of Vine is worthy of its own episode of 16th minute because even though it was only around for four years, it has a massive impact on what social media looks like right now. We wouldn't have TikTok without Vine. We wouldn't have reels without Vine. But for the purposes of this episode, here's what you need to know. Vine launched huge personalities, who went on to have more success on other platforms, and Vine was only around for such a short time because its founders, a guy named Dom Hoffman, and the two guys who would go on to Found HQ, Russ Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, had sold the app to Twitter before its launch, and Twitter ran it into the ground through a bunch of terrible, short-sighted management

choices. And the founders of Vine were pissed about this. Usapov posted on Twitter in October 2016, after Vine was announced to be shutting down. Don't sell your company. Not bad advice, but the thing is, no one really knows who Russ Yusupov is. The founders of Vine have made this wildly successful social media platform, and they fit the bill of the Silicon Valley prototype. They're white, they're young, they allegedly harass women at work, but they don't get the Zuckerberg jobs or Jack Dorsey treatment.

Hell, they don't even get the Tom from MySpace treatment. What people remembered about Vine were the celebrity users, not the founders. So when Vine ended, it was a sad day on the Internet, but its biggest stars didn't really need Vine by then, and they certainly didn't need to be associated with the likes of Yusufov and Kroll. So what are they going to do next? Enter HQ Trivia. Come with me, if you will, to 2017. 2017, the year Russian bots are revealed to have helped elect an American fashion.

the year the Me Too movement began, the year I embarrassingly have sex with two mics and two Joshes. And it's the year that HQ trivia becomes a global sensation. And for this section, I just want to quickly shout out the 2020 podcast Boombust from the Ringer and reporter Alyssa Beresnack, who covered the rise and fall of HQ in extreme detail. After Vine Folds, the founders move on. Dom Hoffman goes off to start a new video app called Byte, and Russ, Yusupov and Colin Kroll decide to stick together and found HQ trivia in August 2016. A few months before Vine is abruptly killed off.

An HQ is initially launched as a spinoff of an interactive video platform the two had made called hype. Interactive trivia had become popular among hype users, and Russ Yusupov was the original host. When they decided to pivot to trivia entirely, Russ was out and they hired a professional. Remember that. And like a lot of memorable tech bro partnerships, Yusuf and Kroll were opposites in personality. Yusipov was the charmer, the guy who talks, and Kroll was the tech wizard, less concerned with the spotlight. The first game of HQ went into beta a few months after Vine's demise. They were shot live in New York and were hosted by...

I'm your host, Dr. Quizmediceman, the Quizert of Waverly Place, Scott Riggowski. Scott Riggowski from day one. Scott was a stand-up in New York who was far from a household name, meaning that when you thought of Scott, you thought of HQ trivia. There were always a lot of rotating hosts like Sarah Prebis, Sharon Carpenter, Matt Richards, and Lauren Gambino. But from Moment 1, Scott was the HQ guy. Broadcasts were around 15 minutes at 9 every night, and outside of the trivia questions, the host would completely improvise. And when you were watching Scott, the puns were coming hard and fast. my God, the puns.

I'm your host with the toasted ravioli's. Shout out to my St. Lunditics. Regis Trilbin, Pat Slayjack, the woke Woolery, the Musugina-Martindale, rich homie Dawson, host Malone, the bad and boozy Barker, the trap Trebek.

Scott Ruggowski. People loved the app, and in the fall of 2017, the audience grew very quickly. By early 2018, over a million people were watching on any given night. It was becoming a cultural force. I remember people watching it. Everyone would stop everything to play HQ. I brought my friend's birthday party to a screeching halt to have people recall.

I don't know if I would set an alarm for six o'clock or if we would just be like watching. I think we would just be at work and everyone would get kind of quiet. The one time that the answer was bird nest soup because then the next day everybody to get referencing, and now I know that says you're going on. And the community aspect was part of what made HQ unique. It was the rare app that actually brought people physically together. If you were playing HQ and a work friend was sitting next to you, all of a sudden, they were playing HQ.

The word of mouth moved very quickly. And Scott quickly becomes a major part of the app's appeal, along with the intermittent tech glitches that were very annoying, but also supported this idea that this was a story. scrappy app on the come-up. And so, of course, people wanted to talk to Scott. If there was ever a person to write a puff piece on, it was this guy. And so who does? Friend of the show and character in just about every story we've covered so far, Taylor Lorenz. She reaches out to Scott in November 2017 to see if she could write a short piece about his background and feelings on the success of the app, and he said yes. They did the interview. Taylor sent Russ Yusupov a few follow-up

questions, and then things get really fucking weird. Because the title of Taylor's piece isn't Local Comic Becomes Household Name. The title of the piece is, CEO of HQ, the hottest app going. If you run this profile, we'll fire our host. Okay, so this is where, by most accounts, Russ Yusuf's ego enters the chat in a major way. In Boombust, as well as the 2023 documentary by Selena Karoma called Glitch, The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia, many former HQ employees imply or just say that Russ was jealous of Scott Rogowski's centering in this narrative and speculate that he regretted ever having given up the hosting gig himself. After all, this is the guy whose last successful app made a lot of users household names. Employees have implied that he

was determined to not let this happen with Scott. Well, let's just read from the article. Yusupov, the CEO of HQ, called the reporter's cell phone and immediately raised his voice. He said that we were, quote, completely unauthorized, end quote, to write about Scott or HQ without his approval, and that if we wrote any type of piece about Scott, he would lose his job. Yusupov continued to threaten Scott's job even after the Daily Beast explained that the story was framed around Scott's daily life and that he revealed no corporate information. quote, you're putting Scott's job in jeopardy. Is that what you want? Scott could lose his job. I cannot trace the logic of why he would do this. In my mind, it has to be an ego thing because what are you doing? You can't do that. You don't own the Daily Beast. They'll just publish that,

man. But for some reason, he does, and it gets more bizarre from there. From the article. When the Daily Beast read Yusoppa quote from Raghowski saying, quote, I can make people happy and give them the trivia they so desperately love and want. It's been so great to build this community, end quote. Yusupov implored the reporter to take that out. Asked for clarification, Yusipov replied that Raghalski was absolutely not allowed to say that he, quote, enjoys making people happy and giving them the trivia they want, end quote. And at the time, everyone's favorite moment in this unhinged interview.

Yusufov's objections began with the line, quote, Scott said that despite the attention he's still able to. to walk down the street and order his favorite salad from Sweet Green without being accosted, end quote. He cannot say that, Yusufov shouted. We do not have a brand deal with Sweet Green. Under no circumstances, can he say that? You won't believe this, but this article was pretty bad for HQ's public image. Because whether Russ Yusufov liked it or not, HQ players were very attached to Scott Raghowski and were now worried that he was hosting with a gun to his head. He wasn't allowed to say he liked salad or his job. This story went viral and caused a lot of internal discord

and a need for PR cleanup at HQ. Hashtag Free Scott began taking off on Twitter as Parasocial Scott fans asked, is he good? Particularly because Taylor Lorenza's piece ends with a follow-up comment from Russ Yusipov after he is informed that his threats would be included in the article. Well, my feeling was that it was unethical and that you were compromising the Yeah, Yusufov said to Raghowski while on the phone with The Daily Beast. Now, they wanted to reframe the story as me threatening to fire you. Do you think that's a good idea? This puts additional pressure on Scott to perform in order to keep his job.

It is a weird day online. But as always, Scott goes live on HQ trivia, the nightby article set the internet on fire back in November 2017. Technical difficulties. That about sums things up, and I mean everything. But here I am. Hello. Hi. Scott.

Nice to be here. Having a totally normal Tuesday, completely average day. Nothing going on. Look, we are all good here at HQ. How are things in your neck of the woods, nape of the way, huh? But HQ gets out of this unscathed, and they semi-successfully manage this PR crisis. Yousabov apologizes to Taylor Lorenz, chalking it up to being stressed. He tweets at her,

Question, who's a cliche, stressed out startup founder? Answer? Me. Sorry for being a jerk. Lunch sometime? Yuck, I hate it. Yusabov also takes a selfie of him and Scott Rogowski at a sweet green, but the hostage vibes have already been established.

But none of this slows HQ down. Even amid tech issues, the app continues to grow, along with Scott Raghowski's profile. At the end of the year, around half a million people played a massively successful, massively glitchy New Year's Eve game. And while employee treatment was a question,

Scott seemed to be having a great time. When Yusuf and Kroll approved, he did media appearances like New Year's Rock and Eve, and co-hosted HQ with celebrity guests, including Dwayne Johnson. Hey, Scott. Hey, man. I'm trying to do the thing here.

Hold on. Yeah, listen, it's great to have you here, but we're last. We're live now. This is live. HQ is always live. No takes, no redos. Look, I get it. You're not used to this sort of thing. Wow, okay. This is like my regular gig, so maybe I can give you some pointers? How about that? Okay, I would love some pointers, yes.

The successive HQ rules into 2018, with more and more ad partnerships and international verticals being launched. All of a sudden, there's HQ Australia, HQ UK, HQ Germany, as well as additional programs on the app. HQ after dark aired later and you could swear. There was HQ sports, HQ words, HQ jokes, partnerships with big companies like Nike, Wendy's, and The Crimes of Grindlewalt. I don't know, it was 2018.

And the app peaked in March when nearly two and a half million players were on at once. But the problems that haunted HQ from the beginning remained. Even with the huge popularity of, of the app, money flow remained an issue as player numbers increased, and there were frequent controversies with payouts. HQ was having trouble raising additional money from venture capitalists, and this confused tech writer Kurt Wagner.

Why wouldn't VCs want in on one of the fastest growing apps in the world? After doing some digging, the answer appeared to be Russ Yusuf and Colin Kroll's reputations. As the Sweet Green incident betrayed, Yusuf had an ego, and Kroll had been accused of sexual harassment while working for Twitter. Kurt Wagner published a piece expanding on this in Recode and Colin Kroll became the liability. He assured his co-workers that these allegations were not true and issued a public statement apologizing to his former Twitter co-workers, but it affected how he was perceived in the workplace, and it affected his partnership with Yusufov. And while this rift between the founders would remain, HQ did eventually get additional funding. From Peter

Teal. Awesome. So, two and a half million players in March 2018. After this peak of viewership in March, HQ numbers start to decline a little. People were getting burnt out, the novelty of the broadcasts were wearing thin, and frustrations about payout issues caused many users to bail. And while Colin Kroll's reputation was a problem, investors mainly blamed this on the CEO leadership of Russ Yusufov, whose view of HQ trivia strongly resisted change or collaboration. Eventually, the board voted that Yusipov would need to step down as CEO and be replaced by Colin Kroll, and Yusufov was pissed. He pitched literally anyone else for this job besides Colin Kroll. He was even said to have pitched Scott Raghowski at one point and said they could make a

reality show about Scott as CEO while he learned how to do the job in real time. After much foot-dragging, though, Colin Kroll is made the CEO and launches a number of new programs as numbers continue to decline. By the end of 2018, H-Q was still very much a thing, but the founders appeared frustrated by the audience reaching critical mass. And then, tragedy. Colin Kroll was discovered dead of an accidental overdose in his apartment in December 2018 at age 34, completely rocking the culture of the small company. The app went live that evening as planned, but there was no game, just the following message from Scott Raghowski.

With a heavy heart that I must share some tragic news that has befallen the HQ family. Our friend and founder, Colin Kroll, passed away unexpectedly early this morning at the age of 34. Colin, or C.K., as we called him, was a true visionary who changed the game twice, first with Vine and then with this very app that you're hearing and seeing me through right now. HQ trivia, the game show that you love so much would not exist. It's hard to overstate the impact of this loss. Most employees didn't know that Colin Kroll had struggled with addiction, and the creative momentum that he'd begun since taking over from Yusipov as CEO now felt

tainted. And now there's no CEO. So in the middle of navigating the grief and magnitude of this loss, Russ Yuzapov began to work to get the title he had lost back. and lingered for a long time in the role of interim CEO. And at this point, Scott Raghowski and many employees at HQ were having none of this. As the streams were bleeding viewership, they needed someone at the helm that was ready to take creative risks, and Russ Yusipov just wasn't.

Scott Raghowski got so frustrated that at one point, he attempted to arrange a mutiny and a host strike until Yusuf stepped down as CEO, but in the end, Yusibov prevailed, and the now, severely burned out staff, who were still reeling from Colin Kroll's death, started to leave. Scott took a dream gig hosting a baseball show for a pivot-to-video platform called DeZone, a job that required less days on than the grueling HQ schedule and paid him better. He told Russ Yusupov that he'd like to stay on board for one HQ broadcast a week, but was told, no, he was done. He didn't even get a send-off show.

This was April 2019. Scott Ruggowski was out, and stand-up Matt Richie. who had been a fill-in, became the new permanent host. Scott's departure was another PR hit for the company, and HQ continues into this period of decline. The search for a new CEO stalled, and a bunch of last-ditch changes are made to bail the app out of financial stagnancy. Prize money is discontinued in favor of nebulous, valueless coins.

The company experiences its first wave of layoffs, and there's an internal directive to wipe Scott Rogowski's existence from their platforms to the point that his name was banned from their comment sections. Things were heading south fast, even as the core HQ crowd remained loyal. And then, February 14th, 2020, Kerry Flynn at CNN Business, reported that it was game over for HQ trivia, and that the last broadcast would be that night.

And as you may have guessed, the employees also found out HQ was folding the day at half. happened. Good morning, you have no job. And there is infamously one last broadcast. HQ host Matt Richards and Anna Royceman went live for HQ after dark that night, and it was, well, listen. It's unnatural. I'm not going to lie. This fucking sucks. This is the last HQ ever.

Look at this. I'm going to let a broom host. Bye. And this $5 prize is coming out of my own pocket. We ran out of money. We just kept giving it away. Fuck. Yeah, not a sober broadcast, but an iconic one.

Like Matt Richards is saying there, the two are drinking from a gigantic champagne bottle that Russ Yusufov had bought almost two years earlier to be cracked when the broadcast reached 3 million concurrent players. And that never happened. And now it was over. And as far as fans were concerned, this was it for HQ. Things fluctuated after this.

HQ would come back for dribs and drabs, but by the end of 2022, everything had stopped and it was removed from the app store in 2023. And it's a real shame, right? I mean, I can't help but think how comforting games of HQ, might have been during the pandemic lockdown if they had had the runway and the leadership to keep going. But that just never happened.

HQ remained firmly in the before times. And it's easy to claim that the death of this app was due to the state of the internet at the time. Because there were a lot of similar high-funded video content aimed to look good and go viral. Bigger empires have fallen over smaller algorithmic tweaks. But the real answer as to why things didn't work out for HQ trivia, lies somewhere in between.

So how should we remember this? Seven years later, I went to the source, Quiz Daddy himself. When we come back, my dumb ass takes the bus all the way to Venice Beach to talk with Scott Raghowski. On the floor of his storage unit, never say I didn't do anything for you. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire. Not a whole lot was salvageable.

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the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Ed. Everyone say, hello, Ed. I'm from a very rural background myself. My dad is a farmer. and my mom is a cousin, so like, it's not like... What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club?

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A new podcast called Wisecrack, where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage. Available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp

designed to be hell on earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training.

These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning.

Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th Minute. Here's my review of Despicable Me 4. Why do they think I want to see more of Gru's family? There is no circumstance where I want to see more of Gru's family. You want me to get invested in Gru's baby son?

I have news for you, pal. Gru has 30,000 sons. They're called The Minions. And today we are talking about HQ trivia. A few weeks ago, I took a bus down to Marina Del Rey on the outskirts of Los Angeles to meet up with the Quiz Daddy himself, Scott Rogowski. He was in town to host a slew of shows at VidCon, the annual Anaheim convention where the internet's biggest stars go to meet fans and talk about Vid? I don't know. I haven't been.

But before Scott left town, he wanted to sort out and photograph some of his carefully collected vintage t-shirt stock to post to his online store Quiz Daddy's closet. There was actually a brick and mortar location in Santa Monica for a few years. a time that Scott remembers very fondly, but the combined realities of the pandemic and a desire to live closer to his family in New York brought Scott's business online. So I'm at the gate of this storage unit place. I'm sweating my ass off, and I realize that I am very starstruck to be meeting Scott. But he's so nice. He comes out wearing this very on-brand vintage t-shirt, a purple shirt with Snoopy dressed like a little grandpa that says,

The Dad. And Scott is just as nice and easygoing and punny as he also. always seemed on HQ. He even gave me a shirt. He's so nice. And the two of us decide, fuck it. There's air conditioning here. We're just going to sit down on the floor of this storage unit and do the interview right here. And for an hour, Scott agreed to return to the fever dream that was his time with HQ. Here's our talk. Hi, Scott. How are you? I'm fantastic. I'm spending this beautiful sunny, sunny, sunny, what is it, Sunday? It's Sunday. This gorgeous sunny Sunday indoors in my storage unit here in Marina del Rey. That's, wow, really living the Venice Beach dream. This is paradise. This is it. So yeah, we are at the extra space storage.

Let's start to introduce yourself however you want to. I am Scott Rogowski. I am a human. Last I checked. What am I? I'm here because I am a main character on the internet. I think, or was, is was. Which is the best way to be. Making it was is way better than is. I don't know if I'm a main character anymore, but I don't know if I want to be these days, frankly. What else can I tell you?

I am the current proprietor of QuizDaddy's vintage clothing business, which now exists online at QuizDaddies.com and QuizDaddies.net. I secured both URLs. I used to have a store in Santa Monica for two years, closed it. It now lives behind me in the storage unit. So I was a vintage freak from like back high school days. Okay. Where did you go?

Where did you grow up? I went to a school called Horace Mann in Riverdale, Bronx, New York. I grew up in Harris, New York, Westchester County. Okay. New York. And my dad's closet is where I first discovered vintage, which I think if you ask people. Yeah. That's mostly where they first discovered it's like their parents' clothes.

So you got into thrifting as a teenager and then how does that passion sort of develop over time? Well, I kind of like started hoarding stuff, right? I would buy things that I would see, you know, cool stuff that didn't even fit me. And I would say, well, I can't leave this on the rack for 50 cents. So I'd buy the Terry cloth, you know, track suit or whatever it was. And these would start accumulating very quickly to the point where in 2003 I decided I'm going to get into e-commerce because there was a, There was a website called Vintage Vantage, which I was, you know, I shopped from like once or twice just to kind of sample, see how they package the things.

And I was taking inspiration from these, like, there was a group of people out in San Diego, I think. They look so cool in their website. They were like just hanging out by the beach, selling vintage clothing. I like, this sounds like a career. And I didn't know how to build a website, but my buddy Scott. Bula did. Shout out Scott.

Okay. So he built the site. I started loading things up taking, using my sister and her friends and my friends as models. we take photos, put them on the website. That's the coolest, yeah. But nobody bought anything because this was 2003. And I didn't know how to market a website. Yeah, you're basically a kid.

Yeah. So that was a short-lived experiment that quickly failed. But I went to college and I brought my stuff with me and I sold my vintage on the quad. And I kept it going all through college and kept buying, buying, buying. And then, you know, life kind of got in the way. But I always been buying, always collecting to the point where I had like, 4,000 pieces when I moved to LA and I decided in 2022 after something fell through where I had some like escrow. I was going to try to buy a place and it fell through. I had my escrow money

come back and I'm like, what am I can do with this? I already budgeted away. I'm like, let me just put it towards a store. And I just, I use that as the down payment for rent. That rocks. And that was, that was it. And I ended up being like so much more fun than owning a crappy condo that I almost bought. That would have been a disaster, frankly, now that I look back on it. It was the best. So much fun. I miss it. I hope to do it again. But my clientele was, geez, everyone from Ethan Cohen of the Cohen brothers to Allie McGraw of a love story, to Gina Davis bought a t-shirt. Am I allowed to say this? Am I like outing my celebrity clientele? But just a lot of regular people from Santa Monica and, well,

side and people would come from all parts of LA and then the international clientele was really cool Germans and Finnish people and South America and everywhere. I mean, it was, I met so many great people. I made a lot of friends. My buddy Tim Melville, I became very good friends with Tim, and my employees started out as just customers. Oh, cool. Almost like high fidelity. They were just hanging around the shop. They came, they need some help. I'm like, yeah, actually, I could use some help run here. So I, you know, got some people working for me with me. And I don't know, it was, it became like a real kind of community hub, it felt like. Okay. So going back a little bit again, what else were you passionate about as a kid? Oh, God. My problem was I had too many passions.

Baseball, sports, but baseball primarily, baseball cards, sports cards. I like players. I like the game. I like to watch the boys play the game. You like to watch the boys hit the ball. The boys hit the ball, they catch the ball, they throw the ball, they run. And you're cheering. I'm cheering. You're cheering and you're loving. Yeah, yeah.

So you're here right now, but you're, you move back to New York. Yeah, I move back January. How's that feeling? Feels good. It feels a little unsettling, though, because I don't really have a place there either. I'm staying with my partner. And it's her place. And I'm trying to respect that.

Not like fully moving my stuff in. Tricky place to be in. Yeah, so it's like I'm kind of, you know, split between coasts, but I also don't have like, you know, a solid place of my own and either. But it's nice. I mean, I love being back in New York with her, my friends, my parents, my dog. Yeah. So it's a good life. I'm very happy to be where I am.

I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, Jamie. It's true. That's what they say. So how do you get into comedy originally? When does that become a part of your life? That was like a kind of a, I guess it started in high school again where I was a student body president in my senior year. Okay. And my proto stand-up was delivering these speeches at my school assemblies, which made me realize like, well, I even, the fact that I won was on the basis of my speeches, which were just funny speeches.

Yeah. I had zero governing experience. No interest in student governance. Like, I beat all these career school politicians. which I felt a little bad about. But, you know, I had the funnier speech and that's all that's all you needed. You won on Riz. I won't on Riz along.

And then, you know, you think about, like, again, this was 20-something years ago, but you think like, oh, is this like a proto-Trumpian approach even? Like, he had zero experience too. And he just won on his humor. And he went on his version of Riz. His version of it. God. So I don't know if it was like a good precedent to set, frankly, because like, no, seriously,

like every student by president was like the most serious minded they all went to harvard they're all like you know student president class presence blah blah and i just came in i mean i actually loved it and i was all about i was like i had this whole recycling initiative and i had a whole um booze free initiative as well wow okay nard temperance movement i tried to start okay that wasn't very successful but i was like guys it's against the law we're not 21 jail that wasn't my most popular platform but um but the recycling was cool i ended up doing it myself mostly because this is like a couple years where bloomberg suspended new york city recycling oh wow and this was like when i yeah it was just as i was taking office okay so i said guys i live in

westchester we still recycle up there all put your cans and bottles in the i brought like my own recycling mince to school wow and then i would bring them home to westchester that's so nice put them in the machine and get a nickel for each one. And I made about like 300 bucks over the course of the year. Well, I think that that is. I think I deserved it at that point. I think that's more than Trump has done. I think that that's actually, yeah. I'm like thousands of cans and bottles for my school. Yeah. Funny speeches. And then I went to college and then I took a course to get a couple credits in like this optional winter semester. And it was a stand-up comedy class.

The first one, this guy taught us, a grad student taught it. And the final project was like five minutes of original material. And I got up there and there like 20 people in the class. I was the last one on stage. And what can I say? I headlined my first thing. They put me, he threw me at the end. And it was Crush City.

Yeah, people are like coming up to be strangers. Like, have you done this before? I go, no. Like, you should do this. You're good. I was like, really? Me? All that external validation.

It was just the greatest surge through my body. So, yeah, two weeks later, I did the same set at an open mic in D.C. At the Soho Coffee House, Soho Tea and Coffee, and DuPont Circle. And it was a bomb because no one was paying attention. It's like the same material. Yeah, I was like, wait a minute. It was a very early lesson. I learned, okay, so the same exact jokes.

in front of 200 students going nuts in front of like 50 apathetic coffee drinkers on their laptops. Right. Who are seeing... Who don't want comedy. Yeah, it took me a long time to accept that. You're like, no, this is...

I am doing this against their will. Yeah. It's okay if they don't like it. Yeah, exactly. Forcible comedy is never a good idea. So that was... But anyway, I still enjoyed it. So I stepped, I just kept kind of doing it slowly

and moved to the city for two thousand... summer of 2006 and did a whole like comedy boot camp for myself hosting open mics going open mics meeting people seeing invite them up seeing you know going to refeefi being lucky enough to to do a couple of really cool shows like oh hello with nick and john in 2006 that's amazing yeah yeah that's cool but uh haven't heard from them since no um no they're great love them love everyone and I love my life and how are you Jamie Loftus? I'm good I'm good I've had similar comedy moments where you're like well

if this is as good as it gets great exactly I love it that's how I feel I feel so blessed to just have these moments and then you know if we want to skip to HQ it's like then HQ comes along and it's like shit now I really feel I could retire it's I mean I do want to get to HQ and ask about so at this point you've been in the city for years you've been doing stand-up.

Yeah, so this is like from 2007, I graduate 2007, I come back, I moved to Brooklyn in fall of 2007, from then to 2017. 10 years I'm doing comedy in New York. You had a weekly show, right? It wasn't quite weekly. Try to do it monthly. Maybe it would be every two months, whatever, whenever I can get. But yeah, running late with Scott Regals because of my talk show, I had a show called 12

Angry Mascots before that, which was like a sports. comedy talk show. And, you know, my stand-up, as wasn't much, but like I kind of transitioned to doing the talk shows because I just enjoyed it more. And I got to do my own, like, monologue, which was my own version of stand-up. Like, I don't want to sit through, oh, an hour of other people. I'm just going to do my own thing, my own show. And it was, that was how I enjoyed doing it. Yeah. And that then led to, I don't know if it led to it directly, but I got a call to audition for HQ in the spring of 2017 and I got the gig and then that just changed everything. What happened was that the internet wasn't quite, I don't know, I think,

I think what happened was you had regular people who were not writers or comedians that were just like making content on their own, all this UGC stuff that just was coming up, coming up. nobody's paying them to do it. Nobody's producing it. There's no big company writing a check. And that stuff was getting views just as much as, if not more, than all the highly produced stuff that was very expensive. Right. And these companies are like, what are we doing this for? Why are we funding all these, you know, quote unquote funny people who are funny, professionally funny sometimes. But there's something about just, I guess, a girl in her room doing a dance that's more entertaining for the digital natives. Like I just,

I still can't figure out that. Yeah. What was your relationship with the internet like when you started doing HQ? It's a good question. And I would say it was, I used it. I didn't abuse it. I didn't love it. Yeah.

I didn't, you know, I was very late. I was a late bloomer, late adopter to like everything. Okay. Twitter. I didn't even have an Instagram when I started HQ. I just didn't, I don't know if I cared enough or I didn't under appreciate the importance of it or whatever, but I just, I just didn't feel like I'm going to, I want to waste my time engaging so heavily online. Okay. Like to the day, I don't go on Reddit.

I really stopped using Twitter, you know, mostly completely for a couple of years now. Didn't want to just go that deep with this stuff. I don't know. It just never clicked with me. And in fact, I kind of look down on it all Because I've come from that old school mentality Of like, what is this? Who are these Snapchat comedians?

Like, what is this garbage that people are calling comedy now? We'll be right back with the rest of my interview with Scott Rikowsky. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire. that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison

or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program

and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Ed. Everyone say hello, Ed.

from a very rural background myself my dad is a farmer and my mom is a cousin so like it's not like what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke but that really was my reality nine years ago

I just normally do straight stand-up but this is a bit different on stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear 22nd of July 2015 a 23 year old man had killed his family. And then he came to my house.

So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wisecrack, where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage. Available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th minute.

After Scott and I spoke, my boyfriend and I took a walk on Venice Beach, and boy, does their misogynous peer trash still hit down there. I passed, and I'm not joking, booty shorts that read Mike's bitch, John's property, Phil's pillow, and... It's lunch. Here's the rest of my interview with Scott Ruggowski. So you go into HQ in 2017. You're not big on the internet. I'm disparaging the internet culture already. I'm coming into thinking.

In fact, my first reaction when they said, okay, you want to audition for this show? It's like a talk show. It's like a game show on your phone? The hell is this? I just didn't know where this was going to land me or where it would take my career. and I was very much at the time, like, I said, 10 years into a comedy career. Right. You're in an adult, too, which I feel like...

In an adult. Yeah. And I'm wondering to myself, you know, where is this going? How much more do I have left in the tank? I was moving to L.A. That was the plan. So I was going to move to L.A. in 2017. I gave him my apartment when I got the H.Q.

Audition. I already decided I'm moving out of Brooklyn, move in L.A. I was going to take my running late talk show here and try to make it here with that show. But meanwhile, lo and behold, this internet show is what did it. And I think what made it so successful is it was that blend of like slightly produced, but it was an anonymous host, me, people don't know I was. So I was kind of like a regular Joe or just a normal internet person, right? Versus like if they plugged a big celebrity in there, it probably wouldn't have worked the same way.

Right. Because it has that veneer of like, oh, this is corporate media trying to control the internet again. Totally. you just said so that was a bit of the secret sauce i think they made it work like who's this random guy what is this show it's interactive it's live they're giving way money it's free like it was just like the perfect mix of of ingredients to make it work we're in some small office in soho you know you got it mostly engineers i mean guys five of the people i just you know of the nine 10 people were were engineers and then you had your office manager designer creative director

producer and me and the engineers sit there quietly and kind of do their thing and it's a pretty quiet office yeah not a whole lot of action okay but um but me and the producer nick we would kind of like go on to the street we're like let's just try it's like interview the hot dog vendor and see if he'll you know ask a trivia question let's like we were just trying to throw stuff against the wall and see what stuck and it was super fun and and it felt like uh you know total freedom to do whatever we wanted. There was no manual, no handbook. And I got to just go, and this is all in the beta phase, the very early phase of kind of trying it all out. And then it's like, all right, we're time to go live. Let's do it. And it was still just like, go live. That's it. Just be you. Just start talking,

which was super, again, liberating and fun and exciting. And I think all of that made for the success of the show because there was no corporate script to stick to, no talking points. it was just like very organic and natural and fun yeah so i'm curious like what capacity were you technically working in you're there as a host but then you also kind of inadvertently become the face of the company what is that i've talked to a lot of internet main characters who become so against their will but it's like it's part of your job that this is happening how do you like manage that mentally i didn't i didn't really i don't know i never like thought of myself in that way Right. I mean, there's no precedent for it.

Yeah. And, you know, my initial role was like, you're the host, but in the very beginning, I was also writing the questions. Okay. I was also just, you know, in, you know, making the show with the producer. And we were, like I said, just trying a bunch of stuff out. And it was, yeah, it was super liberating, super creative. And it stayed that way as it got more popular. And I started making some mistakes with like the, oh, I guess the capital of Arizona. Arizona isn't Tucson, they brought in writers, they brought in teams of fact checkers and researchers. So it definitely got more professionalized. And with every new layer of professionalism

to the company, the HR person comes on board, you know, it started to get a little, little less like Wild West. That was the question we kept the ass. Like, what's the model? What's the business model? How are you making money? And we weren't. The truth is we just weren't. We were just given away money. Doing these shows, spending a lot. They were We're spending a lot of money on overhead and servers and everything, but that was the model, right? It's like gain a following, get users, and then you can monetize them. The whole face of it thing, like, you know, the boss, my bosses were actually very much trying to keep me in my place, so to speak. Right.

You know, they wanted to be, one in particular, I'll say, wanted to be the face of it. They founded Vine previously. and what I heard through kind of the grapevine at the company is that, you know, they felt a little burned by what happened with Vine in the sense that they created this platform. They created all these stars. Right. Bill Paul Brothers, Sean Mendez, like, I mean, major, major talent was discovered on the vine.

John Mendez started as a viner. Right. Like all these viner's got just super popular, made all this money, got super famous, and no one knew who started the company. No one really cared about that. But I guess their egos involved and these guys wanted to control the narrative a little more, not let it get away from them in the way that it did it find. This is what I was told and what I heard. It was a theory, right? So that was it. I mean, there was a meeting in October, early October. I'll never forget at it because I was feeling like a little bit of the of that creative freedom kind of you know

closing up around me a little bit getting tight getting tightened on me and I just wanted to get in the same page with my boss so I called a meeting with him I said hey just like tell me what what you want out of this and I was on six week contracts at the time too I was just to say are they paying you practically well that's that's the other thing talent just paid dog shit yeah yeah for these like six-week deals where it's like, okay, six weeks are up. All right, we'll re-sign you. So also, like, no security. I was applying to other jobs.

I applied to the Daily Show, to Jordan Klepper's show. Oh, yeah, yeah. I was like, I want to be a correspondent for Jordan Klepper. I'll be a fucking segment producer. I don't care. I was literally applying to be segment producer and didn't get it. That's so, I mean, all while your profile is getting huger and huger. Yeah.

You're also kind of being muzzled to even pursue the exposure. Yeah, exactly. Like, I was not, I was told no interviews. I was told anytime an interview request comes in, you got to send it to me, send it to the boss. He's still squash it. And all his early articles, if you go back, the ones that first started coming out about HQ in October, November of 2017,

my name was not in any of them. It was just like the two founders, the two founders, the founders, the founders, founders, the founders, founders, founder, founders. So, um, I had a meeting with, with my boss. And I just, like, just tell me the deal. Is this, is this, is this HQ with Scott Ruggowski? Is this HQ with, fill in the host is it the Scott Riggowski show with trivia you know I just want to set the

expectations for both of us at the same page right and he's just like no it's very much HQ the host doesn't matter in fact we're going to hire Jim Parsons when this thing gets big enough we'll hire like a big celebrity to come host it right I was like okay Jim Parsons and I'm not making this up this was what the name he came he threw out wasn't the big bank theory still on like whatever yeah I mean yeah good lucky, yeah, paying Jim Parsons what he would have needed to do that instead of realizing that you have a homegrown talent who's becoming popular that you own so cheaply. And you can support and nurture and make feel good about himself and happy at his job. Right. But no, that wasn't the decision he wanted to go with. So, yeah, you're managing tech guy egos. And I want to talk

about the, you know, the parasycial sort of like blow up. If you're going kind of from like to a hundred very, very quickly, I mean, so much of what I remember about that time is, and his people's parisocial attachment to you. Yeah. Like they enjoy playing the game. Maybe they'll get $5 at some point. But like the parasycial attachment to you is huge. So how do you, as that starts happening, how do you manage that? In the beginning, I would like reply to everybody who email me, who tweeted me, you know, just trying to show gratitude for playing. Thank you for playing. It was fairly early on. So I, you know, the volume was at a level that I could handle for a while. And I was trying to engage because I was genuinely grateful for these people who were taking time out of their day to join me on this app and play this game.

It was incredible. And I love the community that built around it. And then it got so big that I would be, you know, again, I wasn't even on Instagram when I started. I finally got Instagram. And then the DMs, there must have been. hundreds a day. I couldn't even, like, I can't keep track of this. I can't reply to everyone. I would play this game. My friend's like, let's do, let's do roulette, DM roulette. And I would, you know, you'd have to kind of like scroll up up, up to allow them to load. So I'd scroll up, allow like, you know, a thousand of these to load. And then I would, okay, swipe down and it would go do, do, do, do, and then we pause. We hit my finger on the screen at one point and boom, we'll open that one. Yeah. Because I couldn't figure a better way to do it. Yeah. And a lot of them

were just like, hey, love the game, love you, blah, but it was, you know, but then people, then you get the thing of people asking for money for a medical thing or my, my friends in the hospital, can you do this or that? And then, again, I want to reply to all those people and help all those people. And I ended up, you know, meeting a few people who were very legitimate and had, you know, legitimate charities and, and issues that I could help with. And I felt great to be able to help with that as well. So, you know, but I had to just pick and choose, like, a couple of them, like, you know, and then there's the tinge of feeling bad for the person that you don't reply to who gets mad that I have cancer too. What the hell? You know, it's like,

well, I'm sorry. I, you know. Yeah, I mean, and meanwhile, I feel like there is, there is, again, specific to this era, this veneer that, like, you're probably making a shitload of money. Why not ask you for money? Again, once the Quiz Daddy's vintage stuff started happening, like, that's a whole another way to connect with, because a lot of my customers were initially HQ fans, HQDies. So, you know, they come on my live streams or, and it's, I've gotten to know my fans in a way that, like, they've become friends, which is really cool. That's really, really cool. I mean, like, again, just like thinking back to peak HQ, it just is, is, we, even with all the

behind the scenes bullshit, like, it seemed like you were having so much fun. I was. I really was. You know, I mean, those moments that I'm calling out, even like, you know, like meeting Joe Biden at the Super Bowl in 2018. What a sentence. Wow. Yeah. Like, you know, Roger Goodell and all the football owners and Mandy Moore and Kegel Michael Keith.

It's like, I just remember the rock co-hosting, Blake Shelton co-hosting, Kelly Clarkson, going to the voice. I mean, I have to like remember all the thing. Robert De Niro, Danny DeVito, Kevin Hart, John Mayer, singing old man. with John Mayer to my dad on Father's Day. These are things that happened. And it's almost like if I don't conjure them up and remember them, you know, maybe I will forget at some point. I don't know.

It's just there's been so many crazy moments. Yeah. But put all that aside, the most exciting and memorable parts to me is when I would hear from someone who'd say, I didn't, I haven't talked to my family in years. I'm reconnecting with my strange son. me and my mom never bonded the way we did over this game my girlfriend and I started we started dating and then we started playing and now we became girlfriend now we're married

it's like like the course of whole relationships would come through HQ and then one of the greatest things was Dan Rather posting on Facebook Christmas time about playing HQ with his daughter and his grandson and the three of them like teaming up to to win because they all had different generational knowledge Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The grandson knew Kendrick Lamar answer and Dan rather knew, but the Watergate answer, like, all the things.

So, you know, I ended up meeting Dan and Marty, rather, his grandson. They came on my talk show. And then Martin came to my store in Santa Monica last year. I'm still in touch with them. So it's just, again, maintaining those relationships and friendships and seeing the community around it. I like hearing about the stuff that was good about it for you, too, because, I think that that is sort of what made it special was it was sort of the rare social media thing that encouraged you to be physically with other people or you could be by yourself. But I feel like so much of the social media that we're dealing with right now encourages you to be alone.

And it seemed like HQ is better enjoyed with people around you. Yes. And then the offices, the co-worker. I mean, again, you just see the group environments where people got together and played. it was so cool and like i mean there was it was unfortunate how things ended there with my time there i wish it ended differently but you know um it is what it is i i've i've gotten past you know any any feelings around bitterness or regret or anything it's just uh i was very invested in in that company you know personally because it was so i it was so frustrating to

to realize we had such an amazing thing here. And I really reject the narrative, the counter narrative. Well, this is, things run their course. It's a hits business, you know, flash in the pan. You know, that is simply, it's just simply covering up what was a very solid, what could have been an extremely solid and profitable and years-long business had the right people been in charge. the right decision has been made, you know, that we could have had five shows coming out

within that first year. That were as big as HQ. Why was there just one trivia, one show being offered, right? Like, what was going on there? I mean, there was just, we could have built this, this business that lasted to this day. And, you know, I'd still be there, frankly. People would ask me, like, what's next for you? What's next? And I would say, what do you mean what's next? this is what's next. Like I'm where I want to be. I'm hosting the show, which is getting more views than all these other TV shows and everything. And it's changing the world in a sense of like how people interact. This is where I want to be. I'll be here for 20 years if the thing lasts this long. Yeah. But it didn't. And God bless them. You know, we're all moving on to other

things. And my trust is I trust that some other company will figure it out. Someone will get it going. And whether I'm involved with it or not, I just hope that like for the same, of our culture, because like you said, it is nice to have a positive force like that, that brings people together, that creates real community, and that brings joy to people's lives. Yeah. Actual connective social media is still, like, it's unbelievably rare. And you were such a big part of it.

I didn't know you were almost the CEO for a second. That was weird. So you went from having no interest in tech, and then less than what, like 18 months later, You were almost a CEO for a second. Wild. Wild. Wild. And, again, I mean, who knows.

Who knows what would have happened? That fell the other way. But it would have been an interesting experience, nonetheless. My feelings may not be shared by everybody, but I firmly believe that there's no reason why this should have just been a flash in the pan. Like the concept was so solid. the tech was difficult to maintain and to build, but the engineers were doing a hell of a job,

keeping it together. And it was just other factors in the business, other leadership decisions and non-decision that ultimately sunk it. Yeah. So you decide to leave. When exactly was that? March of 2019.

March 26. Gilbert Godfrey, my co-host in the final show, rest in power. Incredible. I mean, but you didn't get your, send-off show. No.

Which is bullshit. I mean, it is what it is. You know, it's unfortunate. It's just whatever. I mean, I don't even think about these things anymore, but, but, you know, yeah. I mean, that's the crazy thing about, like, stuff like this show where it's like, we're talking about less than a year and a half or like a year and a half of your life. Year and a half.

So when you leave, is there a sense of relief? I know you went to host a show about baseball. Yeah. Oh, man. It was a, there was a, there was a huge. sense of relief to have this other job offer come in. The timing was kind of perfect. Did they offer you actual human money for this job? Nice. No, I mean, it paid almost twice what HQ was paying me for half the year. That rocks. Because it was like a six-month job.

Yeah. So I was like, how can I not do this? Yeah. I mean, and again, had HQ been rocking and rolling on all cylinders and everything's great, I would have turned it down. But it was, unfortunately, the HQ was going down the toilet. Right. With nothing to do with me, it wasn't my, you know, and I was like, unfortunately, riding this sinking ship, and I had this, this, this parish. I was able, this amazing, again, the timing could not have been better. Just thank the universe, thanks spirit for bringing this to me when it did.

And I was able to move on. And it was heartbreaking to watch the ship fully sink less than a year later. Yeah, I was like, did you keep watching? Well, not, not so much watching. But just, you know, keeping tabs. I mean, so many people left the company around the same time I did. People were getting fired or leaving. And, you know, so I would stay in touch with the former employees.

And, you know, you just hear things. You hear, oh, now there's like 50,000 people playing. It's like, really? How could there be so few people? We had millions. You know, just watching the numbers go down. But, again, it's, I remember getting the news that it finally went bankrupt on Valentine's Day, 2020. I was sitting in traffic going through the Holland Tunnel.

And it was like the holiday weekend and to hear that the employees were let go and just told that zero notice. Like, that's it. Zero notice. It was basically like four o'clock on that Friday on Valentine's Day. Hey, you're all out of a job. There's no money left. Yeah. Brutal.

God. I mean, it's. No severance either. Initially there was no severance offered. No severance. I cannot like conceive of how poorly money was managed in this. Oh, my God. Or how little money existed unclear to me.

Yeah. But so, I mean, in retrospect, you got out when you needed to. Oh, yeah. And that baseball show was a dream job. And I made a friend for life at Nanverick, my co-host there. Cool. And so many other great people at that company, MLB Network. And then, you know, the COVID came and canceled. I was supposed to do it. I was signed for three years. God. And then COVID killed the show in this, in year two. So, you know. whatever it's again it's just i found the next thing i've always been able to find the next thing thankfully and there's there's there's still like i met a guy a couple weeks ago i had a meeting with

him about some web three show that could be big and there's always opportunities there's so many smart inspired people out there creating new platforms new show ideas and thankfully they remember me and they they come calling so i've had plenty of gigs um worked at some really amazing companies, consulting, doing, you know, production, doing hosting in the sports guard space as well, which has been near and dear to me from since when I was a kid and, you know, some trivia companies and some other types of live streaming. It's just, there's a whole, there's still a lot to be tackled here. And I'm just as excited as you are, as the listeners probably are, to see where this all goes. And, you know, if, if an HQ type thing can come back.

I believe it can. I still believe it can. Thank you so much to Scott for being so generous with his time and welcoming me to the floor of his storage unit. And just to be clear, Scott's story is just one perspective on what happened at HQ trivia. You can check out BoomBust, Glitch, and host Sarah Prebus, who worked at HQ since the beta phase all the way through the million viewer mark, who made her own tick documentary about her perspective

on the toxic nature of the workplace. I'll link all of this in the description. But as far as the main character in the year-long HQ trivia saga, it was undoubtedly the quiz daddy, Scott Rogowski. And so, HQ trivia, your 16th minute ends now. Moment of fun this week. Okay, since we are in cursed internet video territory, here's a clip of me putting a jade egg in my vagina on camera. See you next week. What's up, King? going to start fingering myself just so you know.

Put the egg at the base of your labia with really gentle pressure. Slowly push with your finger the egg inside. And once the egg is fully inside, stop pressing. It's honestly going way better than I thought it would. Is the egg all the way in? I think we're getting there. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media

and I Heart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats Flea and Casper, and my pet rockbert, who will out love us all. Bye! Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free.

I'm Ebeney and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime on the new podcast america's crime lab every case has a story to tell and the DNA holds the truth he never thought he was going to get caught and i just looked at my computer screen and it was just like gotcha this technology's already solving so many cases listen to america's crime lab on the i heart radio app

apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, this ain't it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence, rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.