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, 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.
All right, so here we are one of the elephants.
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 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. 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 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 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 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? 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.
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 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. 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 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.
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 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 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. 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 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 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
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
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 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 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 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 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 Fine, an app that caused millions of users to stop what they were doing and watch as host Scott Ragowski, who called himself quiz Daddy, ask five questions.
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, you one 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 eleven dollars on HQ Trivia in January twenty eighteen.
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 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. 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 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.
My god, they were roommates.
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 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
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 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 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.
Down, don't sell your company.
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 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 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 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, 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, 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 I'm Your.
Host, Doctor Quiz Medicine Woman, The Quizard of Waverley Place, Scott Ragowski.
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 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.
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.
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 will recall I don't know if I would set an alarm for six o'clock or if we would just be like.
Watching work and everyone would get kind of quiet.
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
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. 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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, 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.
Without being accosted end quote.
He cannot say that, Usupov 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 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 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.
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?
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.
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. How are things in your neck of the woods? Name of the way? Huh?
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.
Her question, who's a cliche stressed out startup founder? Answer me, sorry for being a jerk lunch sometime.
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 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.
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 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.
Used to this sort of thing.
Wow, Okay, this is like my regular gig. So maybe I gave you some pointers?
How about that?
Okay, I would love some pointers. Yes.
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,
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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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
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 comments sections. Things were heading south fast, even as the core HQ crowd remained loyal, and then February fourteenth, twenty twenty, 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 went live for HQ after dark that night, and it was well, listen.
Come.
To the of the road, they go, is sun too?
Not gonna lie?
This fucking sucks.
This is the last HQ ever.
I'm a lot of broom hosts by and this five dollars 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 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,
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 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 Ragowski on the floor of his storage unit. Never say I didn't do anything for you. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. 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 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 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
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. 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.
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.
Really living the Venice Beach Street.
This is it?
So yeah, we were at the extra space storage. Let's start. Just introduce yourself however you want to.
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.
I think it was, which is the best way to be making it was is way better.
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 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?
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 they first discovered it, like their parents close.
So you got into drifting 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, 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 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. 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.
The coolest.
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, 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 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 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 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
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.
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.
I like to watch the boys hit the ball.
The boys hit the ball, they catch the ball to throw the ball, they run.
And you're cheering.
I'm cheering, you're cheering and your loving.
Yeah. Yeah, so you're you're here right now, but you're you move back to New York.
Yeah, And I moved back January.
How's that feeling.
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 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.
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 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 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
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 like a proto trumpion approach? Even like he had zero experience too, and he just won on.
His He won on his version of his version of.
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. 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, 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.
It's so nice.
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.
That's more than Trump has done.
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 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 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
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?
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.
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 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.
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, then it's like, shit, yeah, 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.
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, 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 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 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 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 still can't figure out that.
Yeh. What was your relationship with the Internet like when you started doing HQ'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'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 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?
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 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 Scott Ragowski. So you go into HQ in twenty seventeen seventeen, you're not big on.
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, ten years into a comedy career.
Right, you're an adult.
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 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, 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 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 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 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.
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.
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?
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 press.
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. 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 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 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 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 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,
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.
I also to say, are they paying you? 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 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.
Oh 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, well, getting Huger and Huger. 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 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. 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, 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.
Right.
I was like, Okay, Jim Parsons, And I'm not making this up. This was what the name because it wasn't the.
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.
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.
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 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?
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. 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 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.
We'll open that one.
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 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?
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 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.
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.
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.
What a sentence. Wow.
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 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 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 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.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
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.
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 was better enjoyed people around you.
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
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
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 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? 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 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.
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.
Like it was weird.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, so you decide to leave when.
When exactly was I March or twenty nineteen March twenty six, Gilbert Godfried, my co host, and the final show rest in Power incredible.
I mean, yeah, you didn't, but you didn't get your send off show. No, which is bullshit.
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.
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.
Half of your life year and a half.
So when you leave, is there a sense of relief and you you went to host a show about baseball?
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.
Did they offer you actual human money for nice No?
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?
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 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 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.
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 now there's like fifty thousand people playing. It's like, really, how could there be so few people? 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 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.
Yeah, brutal, god miser I mean it's.
No severance either, they initially there was no severance offered.
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.
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, 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
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. 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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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 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.