October 17, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your gripe with game shows? There’s a lot of context here.
Rick Rosner: So I’ve worked on more than half a dozen game shows. I was co-creator of a game show. I’ve been a contestant on quiz shows. Five of which include running through a contestant. pseudo quiz show. I’m booked to be in the contestant pool for a quiz show next week. If they’re doing it very Covid compliant, I’m going to go get tested for Covid. Then I’ve got a day in the studio where everybody is just in masks and distancing, the prize for this thing is three contestants and the winner get a thousand dollars and gets the chance to compete in the grand prize round to potentially turn the one thousand dollars into ten thousand dollars. To me, this is just bullshit. There’s a show on all the time on the cooking channel. They give people baskets of weirdly assorted ingredients and force them to make dishes out of them.
Anyway, so, I spent about four hours on just getting ready to be on a quiz show today until they kicked me out because I knew too many of the people working on the show, which is something they can’t allow because it is left over from the quiz show scandals of the 50s that they want to avoid any kind of appearance of impropriety. So, I got a free Subway sandwich out of it. But my general gripe is the exploitativeness owners of competition shows have, where most people leave with nothing. On the run of the mill shows like Chopped, for instance, it is a cooking competition show that’s on all the time on the Food Network and they have four chefs on, and three of them leave with nothing and one leaves with ten grand. The overall budget for an episode of that show is $100,000. Then you have these shows like Wipeout or whatever, which was replaced. I guess this is kind of a violent golfing show called Holey Moley. These shows people go on like – we’ve got to go back in time, 15 years – Fear Factor. I think probably started out with every episode you start out with 15, 18 contestants. Put them through hellacious tortures.
And I don’t know. I think the only person left standing at the end got any money and I’m sure relative to the show budget it was a pittance. It is bullshit that the prize budget should be less than 5% of the show’s overall budget. It just seems like bullshit that they’re getting away with exploiting people. These people are exploitable in the name of being on TV. It is a little like what collegiate athletics is like. The players in the big sports, football, basketball make millions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars every season for their schools, what they get are shitty and incomplete educations and injuries and their bells rung. So, maybe 20 years down the line, they have CTE, brain damage. It is just bullshit.
These shows where people bake a cake or who can bake the best Halloween cake and they’re in there working on this shit for twelve hours building this fucking cake that’s twelve feet tall competing for twelve grand. I know it is cool to be on TV. Maybe, it helps some of their businesses, just the being on TV. But I don’t know. It just seems contrary to the promises being made; people don’t do the math, including myself, so few people know I was on Jeopardy! And I didn’t do the math on how few people actually win on Jeopardy! during the months and months that Ken Jennings was on Jeopardy!. Only one person, one person on Jeopardy!, fucking Ken Jennings wiping out like 174 other contestants. At least now, Jeopardy! gives third place a thousand bucks and second place two thousand dollars. Just go kind of chintzy, but it is better than nothing. That’s it. That’s just my gripe. A lot of TV is both being on TV and working on TV and entertainment industry in general is there are a lot of jobs that are exploitative at the bottom or middle or even towards the middle upper of the pyramid. You hang in there because you want to, maybe, eventually, be one of the people who rakes in all the bucks at the top of the home.
We call the Disney company a bad name, because Disney it is known for working people really hard for, maybe, not the best rewards, except as you climb the ladder until you’re in the position of Bob Iger, who makes fifty million dollars a year. I’m sure his lieutenants, the VP’s of Disney make four hundred and fifty thousand dollars or something. There are plenty of jobs low level at Disney with really shit pay. Anyway where you’re working for the love of the company and a double minimum wage.
Jacobsen: Okay.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal (ISSN 2369-6885). Jacobsen works for science and human rights, especially women’s and children’s rights. He considers the modern scientific and technological world the foundation for the provision of the basics of human life throughout the world and the advancement of human rights as the universal movement among peoples everywhere.
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2020. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 