By India McCarty
GOLD RUSH stars Parker Schnabel and Rick Ness shared details behind the show’s “transformational” sixteenth season.
“It’s a really big season for all of us,” Schnabel told Fox News. “We’re all dealing with this meteoric rise in gold prices…it’s just a very transformational season.”
He added, “It came with a lot of challenges, but it’s a very good time to be a gold miner.”
For example, a “big topic” was the fact that gold prices “went up 60%, year over year,” while “costs didn’t change at all.”
“So it’s an amazing season from that standpoint,” Schnabel said.
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Ness joked, “After 16 seasons, there’s still things that we face that are new, incredibly. I love doing [the show], and I’m just glad people love watching it.”
In a separate interview with Fox News, Schnabel spoke about how GOLD RUSH’s popularity is indicative of Americans’ continued pursuit of high-risk-high-reward scenarios.
“I don’t think that that’s ever gone away,” he explained. “I mean, you look at…the medium in which people pursue those kinds of things change, but that’s always been the backbone of America, right?”
Schnabel said that that spirit has shifted from gold mines to the world of technology, pointing to the AI boom.
“Look at the amount of money and talent that is going into…the next big thing,” he said. “There’s always a huge amount of people and…capital that wants to go into whatever is a society-altering thing and 100 years ago that was…well, 150 years ago, like gold mining…the way to create wealth. And now it’s not. Right now it is AI and robots…the medium changes, but the idea has stayed totally intact.”
Schnabel also spoke to TV Insider about Season 16 of GOLD RUSH, sharing, “I would say this season everyone really stepped up their game and left it all on the field. It was a [heck] of a season, and that comes with a lot of range of emotions and an array of mayhem on everyone’s part.”
“It’s amazing what the mentality of the business turns into when the value of your product goes up by 50 percent year over year,” he continued. “That was pretty exciting.”
Reflecting on his journey in both the mining and TV industry, Schnabel said, “It has been a wonderful journey. I’ve enjoyed every bit of it. Some of it has been tough, but I’ve always had very good people on my side. I got extremely lucky a whole bunch of times. I’m very grateful for that because there is a lot of opportunity for it to go wrong. It has been a lot of fun. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.”
Season 16 of GOLD RUSH is currently airing on the Discovery Channel.
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