hq trivia and the quiz daddy

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Who Zone media. 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 twelve 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,

(00:22):
that was true. I was there. I was the girl
that got the kolonic. Because for as long as videos
have existed on the Internet, even before the very first
YouTube video.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
All right, so here we are one of the elephants.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
And cool thing what these guys is that they have really, really,
really long promises. 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

(00:59):
talking my trash is from the late twenty tens, a
little after BuzzFeed pioneered the underpay a twenty 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.

(01:21):
And my time came shortly after Vine, the six second
video app that becomes extremely relevant in today's episode extremely soon.
The late twenty tens curse 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

(01:43):
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.

(02:03):
There were a lot of models like this. There were
companies like Mike and Weiss, 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 la on screen and

(02:25):
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 seventy five dollars to do this before taxes.
How many leeches are in my bellet button right now?

(02:46):
Only one? Just one. They're going to town.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
They will improve circulation to the tissue.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
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

(03:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Hey, I have an idea, Yeah, hit me with it, Tony,
how about.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
If we pivot to video? That was Tony Hawk For
some reason, the pivot to video. God balk, the pivot
to video. Anyone working in media during this stretch of
years was furious at the pivot to video. CenTra reviled
era of the Internet that it has its own Wikipedia page.

(04:05):
The pivot to video is expanded on in gruesome detail
in front of the show Max Fisher's book The Chaos Machine,
But it boils down to this. In twenty fifteen, Facebook
made the claim that video was the future and that
the 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

(04:25):
and the media landscape being on pretty thin ice, people listened.
So by twenty sixteen, every Facebook executive was leading with
video that spring college pervert turned adult milk cart and
Mark Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News the following.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
And particularly at this time, Facebook is the biggest game
in town. So advertisers took this very serio, 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

(05:15):
you remember there was an election in twenty sixteen that
really could have used some reliable journalism. And what's worse,
all of these journalists lost their job for no reason
because drumroll please, the pivot to video was based on
a lie. What Mark Zuckerberg was saying there was not true.

(05:38):
Facebook was lying. Can you believe it? But at this
time Facebook lying was a bit of a shock to
the average user. In twenty sixteen, 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 Suzan Bronica at The

(06:01):
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 sixty to eighty percent. But okay,
they admitted it. Problems solved right, Well, no, because even

(06:25):
in their admission, Facebook is still lying. In twenty sixteen,
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 twenty seventeen. Because advertisers were
assured the glitch was fixed. Major publishers like The Washington Post,
Vanity Fair, and Sports Illustrated all start foregoing articles and

(06:48):
turning them into cheap video content instead. Some were as
basic as animated slide shows 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. Works. I'm sorry Amazon owns your

(07:11):
unbiased newspaper. You're listening to a show on iHeartRadio. But
nothing really reaches ahead until twenty eighteen, 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

(07:31):
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 we're aware of it back when
Zuckerberg made the original five years to video comments. But

(07:54):
it's cold comfort. By the time Facebook is caught red handed,
the newsroom layoffs have already happened. 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

(08:14):
lie lost journalists their jobs so that I could get
paid seventy five dollars to have bull seam and 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 and T. But what pivot to
video came to mean was a company's last ditch effort

(08:35):
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

(08:56):
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 Fine, an app
that caused millions of users to stop what they were

(09:16):
doing and watch as host Scott Ragowski, who called himself
quiz Daddy, ask five questions.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Is this your first time stepping into the ring with
us at HQ? I want 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 gonna have
twelve questions for you. You have three options for each question.
You have ten seconds to answer the question after I
start reading the question. If you get that question right,

(09:43):
you one in the next round. Make it to the end.
Answering all questions correctly, you win or split the prize.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
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 eleven dollars on HQ Trivia in January twenty eighteen.

(10:11):
This young woman is going bananas. Thirty two year old
Lawn Nay just won a trivia game on her iPhone
and HQ is often lumped in with this era of
fancily bankrolled, semi professional looking video entertainment in the back
half of the twenty tens. It was massively popular, and

(10:31):
like most of the other video efforts, I described that
Crater during the pivot to video had sputtered into oblivion
by the time COVID Lockdown began in the spring of
twenty twenty. 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.

(10:55):
When you peel back the layers, HQ Trivia was run chaotically,
had a strop fickly badly, leaving employees and fans to
mourn what many of them still think could have been
the twenty first centuries Jeopardy. And no one feels this
more strongly than quiz Daddy himself, Scott Gragowski, HQ Trivia
and the quiz Daddy. Your sixteenth minute starts now six

(12:07):
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,

(12:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
My god, they were roommates.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Dream episode. Please dm me. Vine was around for almost
exactly four years, twenty thirteen to twenty seventeen, 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

(13:06):
David Dobrick, and on the fun side, my friend Demia Diguebay,
one of the funniest people on the planet. Vine launched
now iconic YouTubers whose work I love like Drew Gooden,
Danny Gonzalez, Liza Koshi. 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 Vin didn't
do well is make their most famous users loyal to

(13:27):
the app. In fact, as a chapter of Taylor Lorenzo's
Extremely Online Gets Into Vine was often openly hostile to
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 sixteenth Minute because even
though it was only around for four years, it has

(13:48):
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 launch 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

(14:09):
guys who would go on to found HQ, russ Usopov
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 Vin were pissed about this. Yusupov posted on
Twitter in October twenty sixteen after Vine was announced to
be shutting.

Speaker 3 (14:30):
Down, don't sell your company.

Speaker 1 (14:33):
Not bad advice, But the thing is, no one really
knows who russ Usupov 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 harassed women at work, but they don't get
the Zuckerberg jobs or Jack Dorsey treatment. Hell, they don't

(14:54):
even get the Tom from MySpace treatment. What people remembered
about Vine were the celebrity users, not the founder. 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 Yusupov and Kroll. So what are we gonna
do next? Enter HQ trivia. Come with me if you

(15:17):
will to twenty seventeen. Twenty seventeen the year Russian bots
are revealed to have helped elect an American fascist, 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

(15:37):
for this section, I just want to quickly shout out
the twenty twenty podcast Boombust from the ringer and reporter
Alyssa Beresnak, who covered the rise and fall of HQ
in extreme detail. After Vine folds, the founders move on.
Tom Hoffman goes off to start a new video app
called BTE, and Russ Usopov and Colin Kroll decide to
stick together and found HQ Trivia in August twenty sixteen,

(16:02):
a few months before Vine is abruptly killed off and
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 Usopov was
the original host. When they decided to pivot to trivia entirely,
Russ was out and they hired a professional. Remember that,

(16:23):
and like a lot of memorable tech Bro partnerships, Usopov
and Kroll were opposites in personality. Usopov 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

(16:43):
I'm Your.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
Host, Doctor Quiz Medicine Woman, The Quizard of Waverley Place,
Scott Ragowski.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
Scott Rogowski. 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 Pribus, Sharon Carpenter, Matt Richards, and Lauren Gambino,
but from moment one, Scott was the HQ guy. Broadcasts

(17:09):
were around fifteen minutes at nine 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.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
I'm your host with the toasted raviolis. Shout out to
my Saint Ludatics, Regis Trilban, Pat Slayjack, the Woke Woolery,
the Musugar of Martindale, Rich Homie Dawson, Host Malone, the
Bad and Boogie Barker, The Trap, Trebek, Scott Ragowski.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
People loved the app and in the fall of twenty seventeen,
the audience grew very quickly. By early twenty eighteen, 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

(18:00):
will recall I don't know if I would set an
alarm for six o'clock or if we would just be like.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
Watching work and everyone would get kind of quiet.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
The one time that the answer was burg nest soup,
because then the next day they were going to get
referencing and now I know how that's old. 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

(18:34):
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 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.

(18:55):
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 twenty seventeen 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
Usapov a few follow up questions, and then things get

(19:16):
really fucking weird because the title of Taylor's piece isn't
local comic becomes household name. The title of the piece.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
Is CEO of HQ, the hottest app going. If you
run this profile, we'll fire our host.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Okay. So this is where, by most accounts, russ Yusupov's
ego enters the chat in a major way. In Boombust,
as well as the twenty twenty three documentary by Selena
Coroma called Glitch The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia,
many former HQ employees imply or just say that russ
was jealous of Scott Ragowski's centering in this narrative and

(19:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
Usopov, 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.
Usopov continued to threaten Scott's job even after The Daily

(20:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
From the article, when the Daily Beast read Usopov a
quote from Ragowski 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.
Yusopov implored the reporter to take that out. Asked for clarification,
yusopop replied that Ragowski was absolutely not allowed to say

(21:23):
that he quote enjoys making people happy and giving them
the trivia they want end quote, and.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
At the time everyone's favorite moment in this unhinged.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
Interview, Yusupov's objections began with the line quote Scott said
that despite the attention, he's still able to walk down
the street and order his favorite salad from Sweet Green.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Without being accosted end quote.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
He cannot say that, Usupov shouted, we do not have
a brand deal with Sweet Green. Under no circumstances can
he say that.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
You won't believe this, but this article was pretty bad
for HQ's public image because whether russ Usopov liked it
or not, HQ players, we're very attached to Scott Ragowski
and we're 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

(22:13):
pr cleanup at HQ. Hashtag free Scott began taking off
on Twitter as parasocial. Scott fans asked is he good,
particularly because Taylor Lorenzo's piece ends with a follow up
comment from Russuzopov after he is informed that his threats
would be included in the article.

Speaker 3 (22:31):
Well, my feeling was that it was unethical and that
you were compromising the app Yusupov said to Gragowski while
on the phone with The Daily Beast. Now they want
to reframe the story. Is me threatening to fire you?
Do you think that's a good idea?

Speaker 1 (22:46):
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
night The article set the Internet on fire back in
November twenty seventeen.

Speaker 2 (23:03):
Technical difficulties 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 HQHQ.

(23:24):
How are things in your neck of the woods? Name
of the way? Huh?

Speaker 1 (23:27):
But HQ gets out of this unscathed and they semi
successfully manage this PR crisis. Yuzubov apologizes to Taylor Lorenz
talking it up to being stressed. He tweets at.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Her question, who's a cliche stressed out startup founder? Answer me,
sorry for being a jerk lunch sometime.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Yuck, I hate it. Yuzubov also takes a selfie of
him and Scott Ragowski at a sweet Green, but the
hostage vibes have already been established. But none of this
slows HQ down even a mid tech issues. The app
continues to grow along with Scott Rogowski'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

(24:11):
while employee treatment was a question, Scott seemed to be
having a great time. When Yusupov and Kroll approved. He
did media appearances like New Year's Rock and Eve and
co hosted HQ with celebrity guests including Dwayne Johnson.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
Scott, Hey, man, I'm trying to do the thing here.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
Hold on, yeah, listen, it's great to have you here.
But we're live. Yeah, we're live. Y know. H is live.
HQ is always live, no takes, no redos. Look, I
get it, you're not.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
Used to this sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Wow, Okay, this is like my regular gig. So maybe
I gave you some pointers?

Speaker 1 (24:45):
How about that?

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Okay, I would love some pointers. Yes.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
The success of HQ rolls into twenty eighteen, with more
and more ad partnerships and international verticals being launched. All
of a sudden, there's HQ Australia, HQUK, HQ Germany, as
well as addition 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,

(25:12):
and the crimes of Grindle Walt I don't know. It
was twenty eighteen 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 the app. Money flow
remained an issue as player numbers increased, and there were
frequent controversies with payouts. HQ was having trouble raising additional

(25:36):
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 Yusupov and Colin Kroll's reputations
as the Sweet Green incident betrayed. Yusupov had an ego
and Kroll had been accused of sexual harassment while working

(25:58):
for Twitter. Kurt Wagner published piece expanding on this in Recode,
and Colin Kroll became the liability. He assured his coworkers
that these allegations were not true and issued a public
statement apologizing to his former Twitter coworkers. But it affected
how he was perceived in the workplace, and it affected
his partnership with usupof And while this rift between the

(26:19):
founders would remain, HQ did eventually get additional funding from
Peter Teel Awesome so two and a half million players
in March twenty eighteen. 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,

(26:40):
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 yusopof whose
view of h Q Trivia strongly resisted change or collaboration. Eventually,
the boy voted that Yusupov would need to step down

(27:02):
as CEO and be replaced by Colin Kroll, and Yusupov
was hissed. He pitched literally anyone else for this job
besides Colin Kroll. He was even said to have pitched
Scott Bragowski 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

(27:23):
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 twenty eighteen, HQ 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

(27:45):
December twenty eighteen at age thirty four, 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 Rogowski with.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
A heavy heart, 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
thirty four. Colin, or Ck 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

(28:20):
and seeing me through right now. HQ Trivia, the game
show that you love so much, would not exist.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
It's hard to overstate the impact of this loss. Most
employees didn't know that Colin Kroll had struggled with addiction
and a creative momentum that he'd begun since taking over
from Yusupov 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

(28:49):
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 Ragowski 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 Usopov just wasn't

(29:10):
Scott Rogowski got so frustrated that at one point he
attempted to arrange a mutiny and a host strike until
Yusupov stepped down as CEO. But in the end Yusubov
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

(29:30):
pivot to video platform called Desown, a job that required
less days on than the grueling HQ schedule and paid
him better. He told reus Uapov 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 twenty nineteen. Scott
Rogowski was out, and stand up Matt Richards, who had

(29:52):
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.

(30:14):
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
comments sections. Things were heading south fast, even as the
core HQ crowd remained loyal, and then February fourteenth, twenty twenty,

(30:35):
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 it happened,
Good morning, you have no job, and there is infamously
one last broadcast. HQ host Matt Richards and Anna Rousman

(30:58):
went live for HQ after dark that night, and it
was well, listen.

Speaker 4 (31:06):
Come.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
To the of the road, they go, is sun too?

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Not gonna lie?

Speaker 2 (31:23):
This fucking sucks.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
This is the last HQ ever.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
I'm a lot of broom hosts by and this five
dollars prize is coming out of my own pocket.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
We ran out of money. We just kept giving it away.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
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 Yusupov had bought
almost two years earlier to be cracked when the broadcast
reached three million concurrent players, and that never happened, and
now it was over, and as far as fans were concerned,

(32:01):
this was it for HQ. Things fluctuated after this. HQ
would come back for dribs and drabs, but by the
end of twenty twenty two everything had stopped, and it
was removed from the App Store in twenty twenty three.
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

(32:21):
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

(32:45):
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
Ragowski on the floor of his storage unit. Never say
I didn't do anything for you. Welcome back to sixteenth minute.

(33:19):
Here's my review of Despicable Me four. 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
thirty thousand sons. They're called the Minions, and today we
are talking about HQ Trivia. A few weeks ago, I

(33:41):
took a bus down to Marina del Rey, on the
outskirts of Los Angeles, to meet up with the quiz
daddy himself, Scott Ragowski. He was in town to host
a slew of shows at VidCon, the annual Anaheim convention
where the Internet's biggest star is 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

(34:02):
and photograph some of his carefully collected vintage T shirt stock.
Opposed 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

(34:23):
storage unit place. I'm sweating my ass off, and I
realized 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
dress like a little grandpa, that says the dad. And
Scott is just as nice and easygoing and punny as
he always seemed on HQ. He even gave me a shirt.

(34:46):
He's so nice. And the two of us decide, bucket,
there's air conditioning here. We're just gonna 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 a
here's our talk, Hi, Scott.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
I'm fantastic. I'm spending this beautiful sunny sunny what is
it Sunday? Sunday is gorgeous sunny Sunday indoors in my
stores you can to hear Marina Delray that's wow.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Really living the Venice Beach Street.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
This is it?

Speaker 1 (35:20):
So yeah, we were at the extra space storage. Let's start.
Just introduce yourself however you want to.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
I am Scott Ragowski. I am a human m last
I checked what am I? I'm here because I am
a main character on the internet.

Speaker 1 (35:41):
I think it was, which is the best way to
be making it was is way better.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
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 quiz Daddy's Vintage Clothing business, which now exists
online at quiz days dot com and Quizdady's dot net. Okay,
I secured both yours. I used to have a store
in Santa Monica for two years, closed it. It now

(36:11):
lives behind me in the storage unit so I was
a vintage freak from like back high school days.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Okay, where did you go? Where did you grow up?

Speaker 2 (36:18):
As I grew up, I went to a school called
horse Man in Riverdale, Bronx, New York. I grew up
in Harrison, New York, west Chester County, 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

(36:39):
they first discovered it, like their parents close.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
So you got into drifting as a teenager, and then
how does that passion sort of develop over time?

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Well, I kind of like started hoarding stuff, right. I
would buy things that I would see, you know, school
stuff didn't even fit me, and I would say, well,
I can't leave this on the rack for fifty cents.
So I'd buy the terry cloth, you know, tracksuit or
whatever it was, and these would just start accumulating very quickly,
to the point where in two thousand and three I

(37:07):
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
their things and I was taking inspiration from these, like
there's a group of people out in San Diego. I
think they look so cool on their website. They were
like just hanging out by the beach selling vintage clothing.

(37:27):
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, 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 put them on the website.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
The coolest.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
Yeah, but nobody bought anything because this was two thousand
and three and I didn't know how to market a website. 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 and kept buying, buying, buying,

(38:03):
and then you know, life kind of got in the way.
But I've always been buying, always collecting, to the point
where I had like four thousand pieces when I moved
to LA and I decided in twenty twenty two after
something fell through where I had some like escrom, 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 gonna do with this? I

(38:25):
already budgeted away. I'm like, let me just put it
towards the store, and I just I use that as
the town 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

(38:46):
it again. But my clientele was geez. Everyone from Ethan
Cohen of the Cohen Brothers to Ali McGraw of a
Love Story to Geena 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 West Side and people would come from

(39:09):
all 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

(39:30):
like Hyphadeli. They would just like hanging around the shop,
and they came and need some help. I'm like, yeah,
actually I could use some help right here. So I,
you know, got some people working for me with me,
and I don't know it. It became like a real
kind of community hub.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
It felt like, okay, So going back a little bit again,
what else were you passionate about as a kid.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
I like to watch the boys hit the ball.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
The boys hit the ball, they catch the ball to
throw the ball, they run.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
And you're cheering.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
I'm cheering, you're cheering and your loving.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah. Yeah, so you're you're here right now, but you're
you move back to New York.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah, And I moved back January.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
How's that feeling.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
It 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 uh, I'm
trying to respect that, not like fully moving my stuff 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

(40:42):
place of my own and either. But it's nice. I mean,
I'd love being back in New York with her, my friends,
my parents, my dog.

Speaker 1 (40:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
It's true, that's what they say. So how do how
do you get into comedy originally? When does that become
a part of your life?

Speaker 2 (41:03):
That was like a kind of a I guess started
in high school again, where I was a student body
president my senior year. It was my proto stand up.
Was 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. I had zero governing experience, no

(41:27):
interest to student governance. Like I beat all these career
school of 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 Rizzz and then
you know you think about, like again, this was twenty
something years ago, but you think like, oh, is this

(41:48):
like a proto trumpion approach? Even like he had zero
experience too, and he just won on.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
His He won on his version of his version of.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
It got So I don't know if it was like
a good precedent to set frankly, because like, no, seriously,
every student by president was like the most serious minded.
They all went to Harvard. They're all like, you know,
student president, class presidents, 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 hired a whole booze free initiative as well.

(42:20):
Temperance movement I tried to start that wasn't very successful,
but I was like, guys, it's against the law. We're
not twenty in jail. That wasn't that wasn't my most
popular platform, but but the recycling was cool. I ended
up doing it myself, mostly because this is there's like
a couples where Bloomberg suspended New York City recycling. Oh wow,

(42:44):
And this was like when I. Yeah, it was just
as I was taking office. So I said, guys, I
live in Westchester. We still recycle up there, y'all. Put
your cans and bottles in the I brought like my
own recycling mins to school and then I would bring
them home to Westchester.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
It's so nice.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
Put them in the machine and get a nickel for
each one. And I made them at like three hundred
bucks over the course of the year. Well, I think
that that is I think I deserved it at that point.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
That's more than Trump has done.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
I think that that's actually yeah, like thousands of cans
and bottles from my school. Yeah, funny speeches. And then
I went to college and then I took a course
to get a couple of 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

(43:35):
taught it. And the final project was like five minutes
of original material. And I got up there and there
are like twenty people in the class. I was the
last one on stage. And when 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 out to be stranger. It's like, have you

(43:55):
done this before? I go, no, Like you should do this,
You're good. I was like, really, 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 DC the Soho Coffee House Soho Tea
and Coffee in DuPont Circle, and it was a bomb

(44:19):
because no one was paying attention. It's like the same
material there. It was like, wait a minute. It was
a very early lesson I learned. Okay, so the same
exact jokes in front of two hundred students going nuts
in front of like fifty apathetic coffee drinkers on their laptops.
Right's who are don't want comedy?

Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah, it took me a long 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.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
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 summer of two thousand and
six 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 raffife, being lucky

(45:10):
enough to do a couple of really cool shows like
oh Hello with Nick and John in two thousand and six.
That's refife. Yeah yeah, but uh, I haven't heard from
them since. No, No, they're great, love them, love everyone,
and I love my life. And how are you, Jamie.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
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, then it's like, shit, yeah, now I
really feel I could retire.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yes, this is like from two thousand so I graduated
and seven I come back. I moved to Brooklyn and
fall two thousand and seven. From then to twenty seventeen,
ten years, I'm doing comedy in New York and he
had a weekly show, right, it wasn't quite weekly, try
to do it monthly. Maybe it would be every two months, whatever,

(46:20):
whenever I can get. But yeah, running late with scotridgusscause
my talk show. I had a show called Twelve Angry
Mascots before that, which was like a sports comedy talk show.
And you know, my stand up as it wasn't much,
but like I kind of transitioned to doing the talk
shows because I just enjoyed it more, right, and I
got to do my own like monologue, which was my
own version of stand up, Like I don't want to

(46:41):
sit through an hour of other people whatever. I'm just
gonna do my own thing on my own show. And
that 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 and Bring Up twenty seventeen and I

(47:01):
got the gig, and then that just changed everything. What
happened was that the Internet wasn't quite I don't know.
I think what happened was you had regular people who
were not writers or comedians. They were just like making

(47:22):
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

(47:42):
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 still can't figure
out that.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Yeh. What was your relationship with the Internet like when
you started doing HQ's.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
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.

(48:26):
I just didn't. I don't know if I'd cared enough
or I didn't appreciate the importance of it or whatever,
but I just I just didn't feel like I'm gonna
I didn't I want to waste my time engaging so
heavily online. Like to this day, I don't go on Reddit.
I really stopped using Twitter, you know, mostly completely for

(48:48):
a couple of years now. Didn't want to just go
that deep with this stuff. I don't know, I just
just never clicked with me, okay, And in fact, I
kind of looked down on it all because I have
come from that old school mentality of like, what is
this worthy snapchat comedians? Like what is this garbage that
people are calling comedy?

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Now we'll be right back with the rest of my
interview with Scott Ragowski. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. After
Scott and I spoke, my boyfriend and I took a

(49:29):
walk on Venice Beach, and boy does their misogynist 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 Matt's lunch. Here's the rest of my interview with

(49:53):
Scott Ragowski. So you go into HQ in twenty seventeen seventeen,
you're not big on.

Speaker 2 (49:59):
The now disparaging the Internet culture already I'm coming into think.
I mean, in fact, my first reaction when they said, okay,
you want audition for this show, it's like a talk shit,
it's like a game show on your phone. The hell
is this? I just didn't know where this was gonna
land me or where it would take my career. And
I was very much at the time, like I said,

(50:20):
ten years into a comedy career.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Right, you're an adult.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
Too, in an adult 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 LA that
was the plan. So I was gonna move to LA
in twenty seventeen. I gave him my apartment. When I
got the HQ audition, I I already decided I'm moving
out of Brooklyn move in LA. I was gonna take
my running late talk show here and try to make

(50:44):
it here with that show. But meanwhile, lo and behold
this internet show is what did it? 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 who I was, so I was kind
of like a regular Joe or just a normal Internet person. Right,
versus like if they plugged the big celebrity in there,

(51:05):
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 you just said,
so that was a bit of the secret sauce. I
think they made it worked, Like who's this random guy?
What is this show? It's interactive, it's live, they're giving
away money, it's free. Like it was just like the

(51:26):
perfect mix of ingredients to make it work. We're in
some small office and soho, you know, we got it
mostly engineers. I mean, I guess five of the people
I just you know, of the nine to ten people
were engineers. And then you your office manager, designer, creative director, producer,
and me and the engineer sits there quietly and kind

(51:47):
of do their thing, and it looks pretty quiet office,
not a whole lot of action. But me and the
producer Nick, we would kind of like go into the street.
We're like, let's just try let's interview the hot dog
vendor and see if he'll ask a trivia question. Let's
like we were just trying to throw stuff against the
wall and see what's stuck. And it was super fun
and it felt like, uh, you know, total freedom to

(52:09):
do whatever you wanted. There was no manual, no handbook,
and I got to just go. And then 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 just be you just start talking, which was super
which was super again liberating and yeah and fun and exciting.

(52:30):
And I think all of that made for the success
of the show because there was no corporate script to
stick to, no you know, talking points like it was
just like very organic and natural and fun.

Speaker 1 (52:43):
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 it's part of your job that this is happening.
How do you like manage that? Mentally?

Speaker 2 (53:04):
I didn't. I didn't really, I don't know. I never
like thought of myself in that.

Speaker 1 (53:09):
Way, right, I mean there's no press.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
I mean yeah, and you know, my initial role was
like you're the host, but in the very beginning, I
was also writing the questions. I was also just you know,
in you know, making the show with the producer, and
we were, like I said, just just trying a bunch
of stuff out. And it was super liberating, super creative.

(53:31):
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 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 you know,
new layer of professionalism to the company, the HR person

(53:52):
comes on board, you know, it started to get a
little a little less like Wild West. That was the
question we kept asked, like, what's the model, what's the
business model? How are you making money? And we weren't.
Were just weren't. We were just giving away money doing
these shows, spending a lot. They were spending a lot
of money on overhead and servers and everything. But but

(54:13):
that was the model, right. It's like gain a following,
get users, and then you can monetize them the whole
face of a thing, like you know, the boss. My
bosses were actually very much trying to keep me in
my place, so to speak. Like, you know, they they
wanted to be one in particular, I'll say, wanted to
be the face of it. They founded Vine previously. And

(54:38):
what I heard through kind of the grape Vine 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, Bill
Paul Brothers, Sean Nendez, Like, I mean, major, major talent
was discovered on Vine, right, Like all these viners got

(55:01):
just super popular, made all this money, got super famous,
and no one knew who started the company. No one,
you know, really cared about that. But I guess their
egos involved and and and these guys wanted to control
then error little more and not let it get away
from them in the way that it didn't Vine. This
is what I was told, and what I heard it
was a theory, right, So so that was it. I mean,

(55:25):
there was a meeting in October, early October. I'll never
forget it because I was feeling like a little bit
of 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.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
I also to say, are they paying you? That's that's
the other thing. Talent just paid dog shit.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Yeah. Yeah, for these like six week deals where it's like, okay,
six weeks are up, all right, we'll resign you. So
also like no secure. Already I was applying to other jobs.
I applied to The Daily Show, to Jordan Klepper's show.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
That's so, I mean, all, well, getting Huger and Huger.
You're also kind of being muzzled to even pursue the exposure.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Yeah, exactly like I was not. I was told no interviews.
I was told anytime when request comes in, you got
to send it to me, send it to the boss.
He's still squash it. And all those early articles, if
you go back the ones that first started coming out
of byt HQ in October November of twenty seventeen, my
name was not in any of them. It was just
like the two founders, the two founders, the founders, founder founders.

(56:45):
So I had a meeting with with my boss and
I just said, like, just tell me the deal. This
is this HQ with Scott Rigowski? Is this HQ with
filling the host? Is it the Scott Rigowski Show with trivia?
You know? I just want to set the expectations for
both those on the same page, right, And he's just like, no,
it's very much HQ. The host doesn't matter. In fact,

(57:09):
we're going to hire Jim Parsons. When this things get
gets big enough, we'll hire like a big celebrity to
come host it.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
I was like, Okay, Jim Parsons, And I'm not making
this up. This was what the name because it wasn't the.

Speaker 1 (57:20):
Big bank theory still on, like whatever, Yeah, I mean, yeah,
good luck, Yeah, paying Jim Parsons what he would have
needed to do that instead of realizing that you have
a homegrown talent.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
It was 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 now that
wasn't the decision he wanted to go with.

Speaker 1 (57:43):
So, yeah, you're managing tech guy, He goes, and I
want to talk about the you know, the parasocial 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 in
his people's parasocial attachment to you. Like they enjoy playing

(58:04):
the game, maybe they'll get five dollars at some point,
but like, the parasocial attachment to you is huge. So
how do you as that starts happening? How do you
manage that?

Speaker 2 (58:14):
In the beginning, I would like reply to everybody who
emailed me, who tweeted me, you know, just trying to
show gratitude for playing, thank you for playing. 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.

(58:36):
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 friends like let's do
let's do let's do rolette DM roulette, and I would

(58:57):
you know, you'd have to kind of like scroll up
to them to load. So I'd scroll up up, up low,
like you know, a thousand of these to load, and
then I would okay, swipe down and it would go
ju and let me pause. We hit my finger on
the screen at one point and boom.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
We'll open that one.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
Because I couldn't figure out a better way to do it. Yeah,
And a lot of them are just like, hey, love
the game, love you, but but you know, it was
you know, but then people then you get the thing
of people asking for money for a medical thing or
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

(59:36):
and had had you know, legitimate charities and 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?

Speaker 3 (59:56):
You know.

Speaker 2 (59:56):
It's like, well, I'm sorry, I you know.

Speaker 1 (59:58):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
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 ith qtis, so
you know, they come on my live streams or and
it's got I've gotten to know my fans in a
way that like they've become friends, which is really cool.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
That's really really cool. I mean, like again, just like
thinking back to PKHQ, it just is we even with
all the behind the scenes bullshit, like it seemed like
you were having so much fun.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
I was, I really was. And you know, I mean
those moments that I'm calling out even like you know,
like meeting Joe Biden at the Super Bowl in twenty eighteen.

Speaker 1 (01:00:52):
What a sentence. Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
Yeah, Like you know, Roger Goodell and all the football
owners and Mandy Moore and keegl Michael Keats. I just
remember the Rock Coast, the Rock co hosting, Blake Shelton
co host and Kelly Clarkson going to the Voice. I mean,
you have to like remember all the things. Robert De Niro,
Danny DeVito, Kevin Harr, John Mayer singing Old Man with

(01:01:14):
John Mayer to my dad on Father's Day. These are
things that happened, and it's like 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

(01:01:35):
I didn't I haven't talked to my family in years.
I'm reconnecting my extrange 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.
I mean, 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

(01:01:57):
posting on Facebook Christmas time about playing HQ with his
daughter and his grandson and the three of them like
teaming up to win because they all had different generational knowledge.

Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
Chistry, the grandson new Kendrick Lamar answer and Dan Rather
new but the Watergate answer and like all the things.
So you know, I ended up meeting Dan and Marty Rather,
his grandson. They came to my talk show, and then
Martin came to my store in Santa Monica last year.
I'm still touching them. So it's just again maintaining those
relationships and friendships and seeing the community around it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
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.

(01:02:57):
And it seemed like HQ was better enjoyed people around you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
Yes, and then the offices, the co work. I mean again,
you just see that the group, the group environments where
people got together and play. It was so cool and look,
I mean there was it was unfortunate how things ended
there with my time there. I wish it ended differently,
but you know, it is what it is. I've I've
gotten past, you know, any any feelings around bitterness or

(01:03:24):
regret or anything. It's just I was very invested in
in that company, but you know, personally because it was
so it was so frustrating to realize we had such
an amazing thing here. And I really reject the narrative
the coarterity. Well, this is things run their course. It's

(01:03:47):
a hits business, you know, flash in the pit. 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

(01:04:10):
out within that first year that were as big as HQ.
Why was there just one triviat one show being offered right?
Like what was going on there? I mean, there was
just we could have built this 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?

(01:04:31):
This is what's next, Like, I'm where i want to be.
I'm I'm I'm hosting the show which is getting more
views than all these other TV shows and everything, and
it's it's changing the world in the sense of like
how people interact. This is where I want to be.
I'll be here for twenty years if this, if the
thing lasts this long. Yeah, but it didn't, and you
kind of bless them, you know, We're all moving on
to other things. And my trust is I trust that

(01:04:54):
some other company will figure it out, someone will get
it going, and whether I'm involved with or not, I
just hope that, like for the sake 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.

Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Like it was weird.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
So you went from having no interest in tech and
then less than what like eighteen months later, you were
almost a CEO for a second. Yeah, wild, wild, wild.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
Wild, And again I mean, who knows, who knows what
would have happened, and that felt the other way, but
yeah's it would have been an interesting experience then the
less my feelings may may not be sure by everybody,
but I firmly believe that that that there's no reason
why there should have just been a flash in the pan, Like,
like the concepts was so solid, you know, the tech

(01:05:59):
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
other leadership decisions and non decisions that ultimately sunk it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
Yeah, so you decide to leave when.

Speaker 2 (01:06:16):
When exactly was I March or twenty nineteen March twenty six,
Gilbert Godfried, my co host, and the final show rest
in Power incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
I mean, yeah, you didn't, but you didn't get your
send off show. No, which is bullshit.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
I mean, it is what it is, you know, it's
it's it's it's unfortunate, it's just whatever. I mean, I
don't even think about these things anymore. But but you know, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
That's 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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):
Half of your life year and a half.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
So when you leave, is there a sense of relief
and you you went to host a show about baseball?

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
Yeah, oh man, it was there was there was a
huge sense of relief to have this other job offer
come in. The timing was kind of perfect.

Speaker 1 (01:07:01):
Did they offer you actual human money for nice No?

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
I mean it paid almost twice what HQ was paying
me for for half the year. That rocks, because it
was like a six month job. Yeah, So I was like,
how could I not do this?

Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
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 HQ was going down
the toilet right, 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 parashote. I

(01:07:37):
was able this amazing. Again, the timing could not have
been better. Just thank the universe, thank 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.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
Yeah, I was like, did you keep watching.

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
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 now there's like fifty thousand people playing.
It's like, really, how could there be so few people?

(01:08:15):
We had millions, you know, you just swatching the numbers
go down. But again it's I remember getting the news
that it finally went bankrupt on Valentine's Day twenty twenty.
I was sitting in traffic going through the Holland Tunnel
and it was like the holiday weekend and to have
to hear that the employees were let go and just

(01:08:35):
told that zero notice, like that's it. Zero, Company's done.
It was basically four o'clock on that Friday on Valentine's Day. Hey,
you're all out a job. There's no money left.

Speaker 1 (01:08:44):
Yeah, brutal, god miser I mean it's.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
No severance either, they initially there was no severance offered.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
No severance. I cannot like conceive of how poorly money
was managed, 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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:04):
Oh yeah, and that Baseball Show was a dream job.
And I made a friend for life at nan verk
my co host there, and so many of the great
people at that at that company MLB Network. And then
you know, the COVID came and cancel that I was supposed
to do. I was signed for three years, god, and
then COVID killed the show in year two. So you know, whatever,

(01:09:27):
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 of 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

(01:09:50):
remember me and they they come calling. So I've had
plenty of gigs, worked at some really amazing companies, consulting,
doing you know, production, doing hosting in the sportscard 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.

(01:10:11):
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 yeah, you know, if an HQ type thing can
come back, I believe again. I still believe again.

Speaker 1 (01:10:28):
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
tiktocumentary about her perspective on the toxic nature of the workplace.

(01:10:52):
I'll link all of this in the description, But as
far as the main character in the year long HQ
Trivia saga, undoubtedly the quiz Daddy Scott Ragowski, and so
HQ Trivia your sixteenth minute ends now. Moment of fun
this week. Okay, since we are in cursed internet video territory,

(01:11:16):
here's a clip of me putting a jade egg in
my vagina on camera. See you next week. What's up, Gang,
I'm gonna start fingering myself, Jill say, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:11:27):
Put the egg at the base of your labia with
really gentle pressure, slowly push with your finger the egg inside,
and then once the egg is fully inside, okay, stop pressing.

Speaker 1 (01:11:38):
It's honestly going way better than I thought it would.
Is the egg all the way in? I think we're
getting there. Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone
Media and Iheartradia. It is written, posted, and produced by
me Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and

(01:12:00):
Robert Evans. Pretty amazing. Ian Johnson is our supervising producer
and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad thirteen
and Pet shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my
Cat's Flee and Casper, and by pet Rockbert who will
outlive us all. Bye.

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Jamie Loftus

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