Newsletter #193 - Savvy Scott
My friend built a game show and I want you to play it
I met Scott Rogowsky on November 20, 2017. Scott was hosting a new trivia show called HQ and my friend Nick, who worked on the show, asked me to come by and take some behind-the-scenes photos.
Do you remember HQ Trivia? For a little while, it was the biggest thing on the internet. It seemed like it was going to be one of those apps that would permeate culture on every level. Scott was going to become a household name and everyone involved with the company was going to get really rich.
Well... shit happened.
That's the startup world, right? Win some. Lose some.
I’ve never had anything on that scale happen to me, but I’ve had my own moments of almost. Those times where you can have something big right in front of you and then it just... doesn't happen.
From “Digitizing tapes from the 90s and making a startling discovery.”
Scott and I talked about all of this during a rainy weekend a few years back. Just that feeling. To rise to heights previously unknown or unfelt. And then to fall back down to total irrelevancy.
It’s sad, but it’s also somehow beautiful.
Anyway.
Here we are. The year is 2026, the fascists have taken over the United States of America, hypercapitalism is all that matters, and AI has driven everyone insane. This seems like the perfect set of ingredients for Scott to try again. So he did. He built his own game show app called Savvy.
I sent Scott a few questions to see what’s going on.
What is Savvy? Give me the pitch.
Savvy is the world’s only mobile gaming platform for live-hosted, two-way interactive game shows, currently streaming its flagship title, a word puzzle game called TextSavvy, Sunday through Thursday at 9pm Eastern.
I like to think of Savvy as a radical experiment in making phones fun again. We’re doing our best to create a safe space for attention, intention, and human connection in a world engineered for outrage, addiction, and isolation. You don’t dissociatively scroll Savvy; you show up for it. You don’t mindlessly binge it; you bring it. We’re a twenty-minute shot of functional screen time, where neurons are fed, not fried; where brains are refueled, not rotted.
What does a typical night on Savvy look like?
The stream goes live with our “lobby experience” ten minutes before showtime. Sometimes I’ll pop in there to have fun with the early birds: taking Q&A, showing T&A, and reminiscing about the most utterly random retired baseball players, like Kevin Polcovich or Wily Mo Pena. When the clock strikes 6pm in North Hollywood, CA (where the show is produced at Forever Dog Studios), the TextSavvy title sequence rolls, accompanied by our custom theme song composed by indie rock darlings Cheekface. With that, my image is beamed live to the Savvy Nation Army (4,000 strong, and growing by the week), and I typically launch into a poorly-delivered rendition of a hastily-assembled song parody or perform some such other farcical bit of self-mockery. I introduce myself and the show, welcome the chat, explain the rules of the game, and get down to the nitty-gritty: competing head-to-head against the audience in five timed rounds of word puzzles. On Savvy, players who tally more points than the host earn the title of ‘Hostbuster’ and are entered into a grand finale raffle to claim a cash prize.
Occasionally, I’ll invite a comedian friend to co-host with me and play live against the audience, thereby outsourcing the traumatizing humiliation that comes with losing badly and very publicly to thousands of strangers.
Does it ever feel like you’re competing with a ghost? Like, HQ Scott is this thing that existed at a very specific moment in internet culture and now you have to build something new without constantly being measured against that version of yourself?
Although I shall always remain Quiz Daddy Emeritus (and continue slinging vintage tees and sports cards on quizdaddys.com), you are correct to call “HQ Scott” a ghost. Not only because that show is dead, that moment in time is dead, and that era of internet culture is dead, but because that Scott who hosted HQ is dead. I am a fundamentally different person today than the person I was in 2017, a transformation that took until 2024 to click into place following a seven-day digital detox and inner work retreat called the Hoffman Process.
HQ Scott may have seemed to project a fairly positive outward appearance, but inwardly he was possessed of a deeply unhealthy mindset. Only now can I look back with a gimlet eye at that version of myself and see that I was drowning in a whirlpool of negative self-love (a gentler name for ‘self-hate’), spun by near constant thoughts of self-doubt, self-criticism, self-recrimination, self-consciousness, scarcity, inadequacy, insecurity, unworthiness; plagued by anxiety; shrouded in negativity; chronically complaining; only conditionally content.
Part of my transformation is this: “Savvy Scott” wouldn’t bother to measure himself against prior editions, because he knows how pointless and unhelpful that exercise would be; how comparison only corrodes the present. He knows one has to die to be reborn, and we are reborn each and every day; in each and every moment.
“Savvy Scott” knows he’s not only enough, he’s the greatest he’s ever been.
What’s harder: the hustle of being unknown and trying to get noticed, or the hustle of being known and trying to prove it wasn’t a fluke?
It feels different for sure... although I can’t say which is harder yet.
When you’re truly an unknown comedian or creative of any kind, the hardest part is simply finding the mental strength and determination to stick with it, to stay working on the craft in the face of dashed hopes, repeated rejections, and instant ramen dinners.
At the time it may feel like “nobody’s noticing me” or “I’m not advancing fast enough,” but the cosmic truth is: if you’re doing the work, if you’re putting in the time, if you’re doing your best at every turn, you will get noticed. It will simply happen. “When” it happens isn’t important. Just know that if you continue, it will happen. Could be when you’re 90. Could be after you’re dead.
Earnest effort never fails.
If I was aware of the deeper truths at a younger age, I might have been able to spare myself much mental anguish, and my career likely would have taken a drastically different turn. But I’m grateful for those tortured early years... they brought me to where I am today, which is exactly where I’m supposed to be.
When I landed the HQ gig, I was still struggling to get noticed. I still felt like a nobody relative to the larger comedy scene, having pivoted away from “stand-up comedian” in pursuit of becoming a “professional host,” self-producing a DIY late-night style talk show with his 70 year-old dad as sidekick. I had around 3,000 Twitter followers and no personal Instagram (only @runninglateshow). Accordingly, there was no pressure on me. I placed no expectations on myself or the show, and I never fully trusted its early success; in fact, I was actively applying to other jobs in September of 2017, even as HQ was getting around 30,000 viewers a night and rapidly growing, week over week.
I gave it my all on that show, and I did my best, but I had no conception of what was possible with HQ... that within a year, I’d be co-hosting with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to 5 million live viewers.
Now that I’m “the former HQ guy,” having experienced a viral rise to international celebrity and the comedown that followed, I am able to approach Savvy with that same “no expectations” attitude — but from a very different place. Armed with a piercing insight I picked up at Hoffman — that “expectations are nothing but premeditated resentments” — I’m choosing to let go of any expectations around success, and instead trust that I’m already successful.
The success is in showing up with my best, each and every day.
You moved back to LA for this. Not for a job, not for a relationship. Just for Savvy. What does it feel like to bet on yourself that completely?
It's a beautiful feeling. Truly freeing. I feel like I'm steering my own ship, controlling my own destiny, taking life by the reins... no longer being tossed about on the seas of circumstance.
Call me a Somali pirate, because I'm the captain now.
I’m a huge Scott Rogowsky fan, so I am rooting for him.
If you want to play Savvy and see what all this fuss is about, download it here: playsavvy.live
The videos in this email were made on April 4, 2024.
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I saw that top photo on your archive site and was wondering what it was - now I know! SYNERGY!
I thought you met at my wedding!!