August 5, 2020
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, yes, you’re 60 and men in America live to, what? 78 years old?
Rick Rosner: Well, it depends on the guy.
Jacobsen: On average, you got a guy generally living in his late 70s on average in America. Then they drop dead, or they drop dead earlier, maybe four years earlier, than women on average. So, okay, cool, you are 60. So, you’re in the latter quarter of that. If that’s the average, but you work out a lot and you take a lot of supplements and pills. What is your workout routine like each day on average? And are you still taking all these supplements?
Rosner: Yes, I’m sloppier in taking them. You know, I need to start doing it again. I used to lay out like five months worth of pills in trays. About 40 pills a day, and then another dozen or so pills not laid out, but now I’ve just got all the bottles on the counter and I just open them up and take a pill out of the ones that I feel like, so it’s less systematic. I am lazier, since I got cancer. It’s like, “Fuck you,” if the pills aren’t going to save me from that, then the charm of the pills is worn off a little bit.
Jacobsen: And were the pills a reaction to the death of a family member?
Rosner: A little bit. Part was, I want to live long enough to get all those extra years from improvements in medical science that we’re going to get over the next 20 years.
Jacobsen: Do you find that constricts your life?
Rosner: Yes, my dad, my stepdad started taking the pills after I read a book by Ray Kurzweil on living as long as possible. Then at the same time, my stepdad was dying, so that all kind of went together. Now, for seven months, I’ve been pretty much locked down, so I used to go to a bunch of different gyms and they’re all closed right now. There’s one I know I could break into part of it, the back patio where they have a few machines, but it’s not worth the risk just to have access to a good leg press machine. And you’ve got a shitty leg press machine here.
Well, I still work out five times a day and it takes even longer than when I was going to gym, because I’ll just sit here. I’ll do sit-ups using various apparatuses while I’m watching Netflix or HBO or Showtime or Hulu. I may only get 12 sets of sit-ups done in an hour because I’m distracted by the TV. And usually, my first set starts in the late afternoon, about five o’clock in the attic with the universal machine. And I’ve got to push day where I’ll just do bench pressing on the machine and I’ll do 20 sets of that, and then I’ll do a set of sit-ups downstairs or work out, sit-ups plus leg press downstairs, 15-25 sets then I’ll go back upstairs.
And then in between all this, we’re having dinner and watching TV with my wife. We start downstairs from 3:30 to a little before 8 o’clock or watch TV downstairs, then move upstairs and watch TV from 8 to a little before 9. She’ll go to sleep, and then I’ll continue with the workouts, either three upstairs up in the attic workouts and two downstairs in front of Netflix workouts or vice versa, and because I’m watching TV and I’m distracted, maybe doing some other stuff most of the time, I don’t finish till after 3 in the morning, which is ridiculous because most of the time that elapses between my first set in the late afternoon/early evening and my last set is often ten hours, which is not good because I’ve lost time management. I go to sleep at 3:30 and get up at like 6:00 a.m. for a bit, and then I go back to sleep because my wife gets up at 5:00 to get ready for her job. So, I’ll hang with her for a little bit, go back to sleep. Maybe, I’ll take a nap in the afternoon. My day lacks discipline. I should really go to bed earlier. You get on a coffee routine and try to get things back under control.
Jacobsen: How are you feeling at 60?
Rosner: I certainly don’t feel as debilitated as my parents’ generation or my grandparents’ generation felt. I take a lot of cholesterol blockers, blood pressure stuff, testosterone blockers. I take a lot of stuff that addresses the problems that people my age are likely to run into. I’ll probably still run into some of that stuff, but at a later age, I feel good.
I’m able to do my stupid workouts four hours a day. I feel I’ve lost a lot of weight with eating. In the evening, I’m not interested in food very much. I don’t know if it’s the temperature because it’s still kind of hot here or the shit that I’ve read on Twitter about the risk that the country is at; maybe, it makes me lose my appetite, but I now weigh what I weighed in 10th grade, which I hated weighing in 10th grade because I was too skinny.
Jacobsen: How much did you weigh? What do you weigh?
Rosner: I’ve probably put on a few pounds, but at 5’10”/5’10.75”. The last time I got on a scale, I was 137.
Jacobsen: That’s tiny.
Rosner: Yes. So, looking in the mirror, there’s definitely my concentration campy look if I don’t have any clothes on. Not fully, I mean those guys dropped under 100 pounds, but I don’t look like your normal American male, who averages close to 200 pounds.
Jacobsen: What will be a healthy weight?
Rosner: Well, 140 is healthy. It’s what men have weighed for thousands of years. It’s only in the last 70 years that we’ve really gotten bulky, especially in America. There always have been fat people, but it wasn’t like the whole population was large In the 20s, a baseball player might be 5’10, 5’11, 6’, and then go 170, 180. There was a book about this called Stover at Yale about a kid who plays football at Yale. It was written in like 1902. The kid is like 5’10” and he works in the coal mines all summer to get money to pay for Yale. After a summer working in the coal mines, he weighs 148. He’s playing college football. That was skinny for them, but it was in the Depression. People were not huge. Women might go 105, 115. Guys, probably, a quarter of the population weighed as much or less than I do, the male population. Yes, I’d like to weigh more. I will when I feel like eating more. Oh, also, during my ten hours of working out, I’m snacking the whole fucking time too. So, that’s just not enough.
Jacobsen: What’s your favorite snack? Healthy guy.
Rosner: My wife at home, she gets these high-protein chocolate raspberry truffles from Trader Joe’s that are really good. It tastes like fucking candy, but they have like 5 grams. They can’t have much because they’re too small, but each one of them, I think, maybe a whole pack, has about 10 grams of protein, which is one-fifth of the protein in a can of tuna. So, those aren’t beef jerky. It is good, though. I try not to eat too much of it because I feel like the fucking cows with a bunch of hormones probably aren’t great.
Jacobsen: So, how long do you think you’ll make it to?
Rosner: I don’t know. Because they say with all the cancer, the odds of a recurrence in the next ten years is less than 10 percent, but I still had fucking cancer. Generally, it tends to put you on the clock. They caught Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s pancreatic cancer early. This must have been in her 60s. They caught it and were able to operate on it. She had a lot of cancer for years, but eventually, after 20 years or so, it got her. I’m hoping to make it long enough for there to be really effective personalized cancer therapies if it recurs. If I can make it ten years without a recurrence, that’s good. There are some therapies now, but chemo for kidney cancer, I was stage one. So, that’s really early for kidney cancer.
Kidney cancer is well-encapsulated. It tends not to get loose until later stages. So, I could do well. And if I make it 10 years, 12 years, there should be better therapies in the next 20, 30 years. So, I don’t know. I’m still hoping to make it into my 80s. There are plenty of people, public figures, even where they had cancer of early on; they got it and the person goes on and lives a normal life, so I’m still hoping to make it into the hundreds. I still want to do that, but it looks somewhat less likely, except medicine keeps improving. So, I can’t guess how I’m going to do.
Jacobsen: What do you think? What does your family say about all this stuff? Because you have done this for a while.
Rosner: What is my wife going to tell me? We’re under semi-lockdown. I have a pension, so I’m getting paid for doing whatever nonsense I’m doing. She has a job. She worries about everything. She worries we’re going to run out of money, but I’ve got a pension and she has a job. So, we’re OK. We worry about Trump getting re-elected or what’s going to happen to the country, even if he doesn’t get re-elected, because even if he doesn’t get reelected, even if we take the Senate, there’s still 40% of the country who take most of their beliefs from conservative media, which fills their head with unhelpful garbage. So, I know my wife doesn’t really bug me very much about the working hours. She bugs me about her anxieties, which are legit. All right. That’s enough.
[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.
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Rick Rosner 