November 25, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: So, I’m in the tub today. Under lockdown, baths in the tub are still something you can take. My wife takes a lot of baths, and then I use the water before it cools down. I was thinking about how in America we tend to warehouse our old, which has been part of the Covid problem.
Because when Covid gets loose in a senior living center then it devastates roughly 80 percent of the US Covid deaths have been among people 65 and older. I was thinking about how other cultures treat their old differently. Treatment of old people varies widely.
But in the US, if we have the money or if the grandparents have the money, enough money to get stuck in senior living, then that’s probably where they’ll go. I was thinking about, is this a selfishness problem among people who aren’t old?
Because old people they take a lot of attending. They’re not as young; they can’t deal with the tech and they don’t. Anyway, my theory is – I ran it by Carol, who said, “It’s so obvious as to not be a theory.” But she says that about a lot of my shit.
I’ll tell her like most of my jokes are just, “Meh.” Sometimes, I’ll come up with a pretty good one and I’ll run it by her. Often, I’ll get from Carol, “Yes, but anybody could have come up with that joke.” That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad joke.
Not everybody or anybody did, I came up with it. Just because it is made up of familiar components doesn’t mean that it’s not a good joke, so, anyway, my idea is that now compared to 50 years ago. We all suffer from a time crunch because ‘me time’ has become so much more precious than ‘we time.’
Deal is, now, everything’s awesome. Entertainment is awesome. Personalized information feed via social media is awesome. It takes up a lot of time and it’s great, relatively. We want to spend as much time as possible doing that instead of anything else.
So, anything like dealing with an oldie that takes away from that. This is resented, makes us feel time pressure. You look back at the 70s when pretty much everything sucked, except for sex. Back then, sex was only for cool people.
So, people had all these hours of sex. So, it was when your life is filled with just sitting around vaguely bored and resentful. It might be possible for you to be more altruistic because the time you’re sacrificing isn’t worth as much.
And that’s the theory. I threw it up on Twitter and there actually only one guy who called me out saying, “No.” Because if your theory were true, it would be true across all nations, since all nations have the same tech and the US is more selfish than a lot of other nations. I go, “Okay, yes, I acknowledged that there are other reasons.”
He threw some of those reasons. We’ve talked about these reasons. The American mythos of rugged individualism. I was thinking about the Evangelicals, the politicization of Evangelicals, which has been going on for 40 years. The deal is, in order to make Evangelicals a useful political tool, you have to divorce Christians from Christian values.
And the way it has been done is to tie political action to Christian things that are made to seem as if they overwhelm anything else, that if the whole nation is going to hell, then the ends justify the means. You can elect the most godless president we’ve ever had if he’s doing things in the service of saving the country from going to hell and also saving America from aborted babies.
The United States is sinking into depravity and abortion means that any normal everyday morality or everyday moral considerations have to take a backseat to fighting those things politically. That’s the jujitsu that’s been done on Evangelicals.
That you have to forget any moral qualms you have. It has been freeing that you can go ahead and be a fucking immoral dick if you’re working for a greater or a more desperate morality.
There’s that, there’s the fear, the selling of the idea that any collective action is socialism or communism or is opening the door to such that anything other than unfettered capitalism, that unfettered capitalism allows all Americans to discover their greatness through capitalistic struggle and entrepreneurial struggle.
Anything that eases Americans away is fucking socialism and is stealing my tax dollars for people who don’t deserve it because they don’t have gumption. It’s an old tune, but it’s been played very successfully, recently.
To underpin the thesis of this thing, which is that Americans are fucking selfish now, I would say that more Americans than ever before, more people voted for Trump. Seventy-four million people that have ever voted for any other candidate who has lost a presidential election by probably 10 million votes.
A lot of people voted for a guy who’s obviously a corrupt, do nothing, incompetent, lying asshole. That speaks to an America that’s willing to be lied to, manipulated. Because it somehow aligns with they’ve been taught to believe is their self-interest.
That’s pretty much it beyond the things like the ongoing eroding of the institutions that were more collective, that had more focus than even industry. Corporations back in the 1950s when CEOs made only 20 times what the average worker as opposed to a thousand times.
But the head of Disney making 12 million bucks per year. Corporations used to exist for the betterment of or used to care about their workers. Used to, I thought they were bringing good products for the improvement of life, American life in general.
I’m sure there was always some craven capitalistic considerations. But they weren’t as the shift has been away from workers and towards management owners and stockholders. We’ve talked about that. I mean, everybody knows that.
The loss of religion is something that you could look to for daily guidance, moral guidance. The loss of things like the Boy Scouts to cynicism and there being better things to do and more entertaining things to do as a 12-year-old or a 14-year-old than going on camp-outs. Also, the molestation there. We’ve talked about that. Anyway, all that we’ve talked about before.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, they’re in like a lawsuit that may lead to bankruptcy, too.
Rosner: Yes. I was a Boy Scout for half a second. I was a Webelos, which is in between Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts for like two years. I regret that I didn’t stick it out and become a fucking Eagle Scout. There’s still merit in being guided through a multi-year program of developing some knowledge and expertise in a number of different fields, which is really what the Boy Scouts are about.
They picked a bunch of meritorious areas to learn. Every time you learn enough or do enough in that area, then you get a patch to put on your sash. When you get enough patches for your sash, you can become an Eagle Scout. Some excellent people have been Eagle Scouts. I know more. I mean, maybe, it’s still going in some areas, but, I think, it would be a rare and a weird thing to be an Eagle Scout. Age 17 now, that’s all I got on this.
[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 