072 - My Savviest Move Yet
After seven years of waiting for "my next big thing," I went ahead and made it myself
In the early morning hours of February 1st, 1951, cameramen from television station KTLA in Los Angeles positioned themselves on the roof of the Last Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas strip and trained their lenses on a distant area of the Nevada desert known as Frenchman Flats. At approximately 5:30 am, a B-50 bomber plane flying at 20,000 feet dropped a nuclear warhead with a 1-kiloton payload on the basin below, as part of the U.S. military’s “Operation Ranger” atomic testing program.
KTLA’s cameras captured the blast live and relayed the astonishing images to television sets across Tinseltown in what was the first-ever broadcast of an atom bomb detonation. The only thing local viewers could see on their screens that morning was a flash of white light.
75 years after that historic telecast, a new chapter in the history of livestreaming was written this week in Los Angeles. In the early evening hours of February 1, 2026, a new bomb was dropped.
Don’t worry, there was no radioactive fallout. Nobody was vaporized. A handful of people did report suffering retinal damage, however further investigation revealed it wasn’t from any explosion, but rather the glare coming off my custom suit.1
It was a happy little bomb, delivering a 1-kiloton playload of fun — called TextSavvy: the new, live-streamed, interactive mobile game show that I’m hosting on the Savvy app.2
I first moved to Los Angeles in 2021, for a job and a girl. Within two weeks of settling into my furnished Marina del Rey rental, I lost the girl; within two months, I lost the job.
I moved back to New York in 2024 for the sake of a relationship that nearly made it a full year, but ultimately fell apart over creative differences—I wanted to create a life together; she wanted to create a woman-owned, drug-dealing empire. To each, their own.
I returned to LA at the top of 2025, flirting with the idea of a bi-coastal lifestyle, before another New York-based girlfriend boomeranged me back to the Big Apple for what I thought might be for good…
Turns out, nothing is “for good.” All is impermanent. No moment is sealed against time. Form arises from emptiness. Emptiness expresses itself as form. Which reminds me: I need to express my dog’s anal glands before he squirts his stank on my carseat again.
So I’m back in Lipstick City, baby. The City of Angles. The Gabby Windey City. This time around, I didn’t move for a woman, or for a boss, or even for the weather — although I couldn’t have timed a better escape from New York, what with this bombogenesis turning the Long Island Sound into a slushie machine.
This time, I moved purely for me.
And for Savvy.
On my flight from JFK to LAX, I watched a movie that completely missed me when it came out in 2023: Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings. It was very cute, very “adult,” and I was surprised to count three former guests of Running Late with Scott Rogowsky in the cast.3
It got me thinking about why I started my own late-night talk show in the first place. At the time (October 2011), I was a 26-year-old comedian six years into my “career,” with little to show for the effort. I desperately wanted to be writing or segment producing — or hell, assisting in the writers room — for a late-night talk show or sketch comedy show — or hell, a daytime talk show. But the fundamental truth at the core of my creative being was: I wanted to be hosting a talk show.
Slight problem… there were only a dozen or so talk shows on the air, and they all seemed to be set on the hosting front. But not only was it a crowded field, it was also a shrinking one. In the wake of the digital media revolution, television in general (and talk shows in particular) were starting to read the tea leaves on the uncertain future. Tired of waiting for another rejection from the captains of a declining industry, I decided to take matters into my own hand. I gave myself my own show.
From 2011-2019 I produced and hosted over one hundred IRL episodes of Running Late, inviting hundreds of celebrity guests to to join me on stage — alongside my sidekick/dad Marty and my band The Musical Guests — to entertain thousands of comedy fans from New York to Boston to Montreal to Los Angeles, and thousands more on YouTube. Did we unwittingly invent the “live podcast taping,” while at the same time stubbornly refusing to convert our show into a podcast? You make the call!
The many years of extemporaneous performance experience I gathered as a talk show host were directly responsible for landing my gig at HQ Trivia — both in being positioned to be called in for the audition, and in being prepared to “deliver the goods” and impress my future employers.
It should go without saying that HQ changed my life. In a matter of months I went from being an underemployed “struggling fartist” to becoming a household name — outside of the Rogowsky household, even! I spent the final minutes of 2017 as Jenny McCarthy’s guest on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and I rang in 2019 with Steve Harvey on Fox’s New Year’s Eve with Steve. In between, Time Magazine named me one of their Five Faces of the Year for 2018. Insane? Utterly.
The notoriety I gained from my HQ tenure not only secured my future place in the New York Times obituary section,4 it has kept me in demand as a host and producer all these many years since my abrupt final sign-off (March 24, 2019). In that time I’ve been pitched on dozens of concepts by tech and media execs and ambitious entrepreneurs and pursued several opportunities that seemed exciting at first but faded before too soon. I’m grateful for every one of them, and for the people who invested their time and money into incorporating my talents with their visions, but after repeated fizzles and failures, I realized the truth of the quote my dad was fond of deploying around the dinner table: “If it is to be, it is up to me.”
It’s also up to a little bit of luck, and that came in the form of a DM from @ThatFrisianGuy, a plucky Dutchman named Johan knocking on my door with another pitch. Somewhat exhausted by the roller coaster of hopes over the recent years, I hesitated to reply at first, but Johan persisted, so I agreed to take a meeting.
The rest, as they say, is Savvy.
Four months after that intrepid DM, Johan, his product partner Benyamin, myself, and an old friend and collaborator from those Running Late days I brought into the fold named Josh, incorporated Play Savvy, Inc. as co-founders.
A little more than a year after incorporation, we exited beta and went live with the series premiere of our flagship interactive game show, TextSavvy, to over two-thousand concurrent players.
Working with Johan, Benyamin, Josh and our lean but seriously mean staff of extremely dedicated hires, we’re committed to seeing this thing all the way through, to fulfilling the promise that HQ only teased of creating “the future of television.” And unlike my turn at HQ where I was simply a “hired gun” with effectively zero influence over decision-making around product, design, and corporate strategy (I was completely absent from the company’s org chart, if you can believe it), I’m a key player on Team Savvy — and I’m in this to win this.
If Einhorn is Finkle, and Finkle is Einhorn, then Scott is Savvy and Savvy is Scott. If the Olive Garden can commit to never-ending soup and salad and unlimited breadsticks… if Arizona Iced Tea can commit to 99-cent cans… then you better believe I’m committed to creating wildly innovative, irresistibly interactive, world-class entertainment that can be immersively enjoyed from the comfort of one’s phone.
Brace yourself for the shockwaves of surprise and delight that you’ll experience live, tonight — and every school night (Sun-Thurs) — on Savvy (free to download for iOS and Android). Be seeing you… 👀
Dropped from Forever Dog Studios in North Hollywood, CA home to my all-time favorite radio show/podcast, The Best Show with Tom Scharpling, as well as Tom’s spin-off show with Julie Klausner, Double Threat, Tim Heidecker’s hysterical Office Hours Live, and the world’s largest drag-centric queer content network, M.O.M. Check ‘em out here.
David Cross, Amber Tamblyn, and Josh Pais.
Scott Rogowsky, Viral Game Show Host of the Early Century, Chokes to Death on Pastrami