November 27, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: This comes off of the idea that the actual worlds, the universes that could exist that are highly parallel to ours can’t be magically different. You can’t have a universe in which the South won the Civil War.
Unless, you can explain how that might happen through causal effects, you can’t magically have something happen. So, anyway, I was thinking about it. That’s also a principle of writing decent science fiction where I thought about these two productions that annoyed me.
One is called True Love, where several years in the future scientists have discovered how to find someone’s soul mate. No, I think the show’s called Soul Mates, that there is an actual thing. There is some soul that we have.
Scientists have figured out how to read the soul to find out which two souls actually belong together out of the whole world. And then the show is like 4, 5, 6 episodes, each telling its own story about the problems created by this deal.
I’m like, fuck the show because A, it’s not very good. B, this isn’t a thing that can reasonably exist. There is no soul that only matches up with one other soul on the planet. A, that’s dumb. B, the problems created by this thing that’s dumb don’t concern me because it doesn’t cast much light on actual things.
Decent science fiction examines things that are pertinent and important to people in the world. Some people would even argue that science fiction isn’t science fiction at all. It’s just an examination of the present dressing it up in science.
I don’t know. The Day The Earth Stood Still examined dangerous Cold War conflicts, the anxiety that everybody was feeling in the 1950s about like the potential for nuclear war. And this was examined through the perspective of an alien species that shares our same concern.
That we’re going to wipe ourselves out and sends a giant robot custodian, basically. Then there is this other this movie with Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake called In Time. In the future, instead of money, you have time.
It’s built into a chip on your arm. If you’re rich, you’ve got like years of saved up years. If you’re poor, you’ve only got a few minutes of saved up time and you have to keep working to replenish the time you have.
If you run out of time, you just drop dead on the spot. It’s a whole movie about the problems and dangers that the system creates. I’m like, fuck this movie A, because it’s not very good. B, it’s like, I understand the point that the rich people have more resources than poor people.
But it’s a dumb way of arguing about that. It doesn’t offer any insight on any of this shit and it’s via a device that will never happen, compared to the semi-successful like Blade Runner. The Blade Runner movies, they look good.
But they’re frustrating because they’re not as good as they should be and they’re not as good as they look. Half of science fiction movies and TV shows have ripped off their look. The rainy streets, the dystopian Los Angeles, but the movies themselves are only semi-successful.
But even so, the reason for their whatever success they have besides how good they look, is that they try to examine what makes somebody human particularly in a world that verges on one we’re moving into more and more, where it has the potential for artificial intelligence.
It feels like there is relevance. You feel the relevance of points in the movie, like when Roy Batty is dying on the roof of the building. He’s arguing that he has as much right to existence as any non-engineered human based on what he has experienced in his life. Have you seen the movie?
Jacobsen: No.
Rosner: Well, anyway. The decent science fiction doesn’t just pull a bunch of futuristic shit out of its ass. It deals with issues that concern us. It’s believable. This isn’t an issue for a lot of science fiction fans. Believability isn’t that much of an issue like Star Trek. You’ve certainly seen Star Trek.
Jacobsen: Oh, yes. All right.
Rosner: All right. So, Star Trek is super antiseptic. The first series, the first three years of Star Trek with Captain Kirk and Spock and everybody is antiseptic, underimagined, and cheap, because it was in the early to mid-60s.
Their big deal was sliding doors that made a whooshing sound, and things that act like cell phones do now. But it was just cheap. If they wanted an alien, they’d slap some shit on their foreheads or they paint them blue. Humans were not modified.
It didn’t get modified humans until like the third series of Star Trek when you have the Borg. But you’re just like humans that are part robots with circuit boards glued to their faces. So, Star Trek gets points with people for having good writers.
They hired some of the best science fiction writers of the 50s to write scripts in the 60s. So, the issues were there, the philosophical issues. The world they built was just shit. There was no advertising in the world of Star Trek, where, 30 years later, when you’ve got Minority Report.
People realize that the future is driven by market forces and it has very annoying advertising. What I’m arguing is that, the best science fiction addresses issues we’re interested in, looks cool, and presents a pretty believable future, an awesome but believable future, either awesome in a good way or in a bad way or in both ways.
There is another show that pissed me off, which is Altered Carbon. In the future, you can move from body to body. You’ve pretty much got a little hockey puck that plugs into the back of your neck and that contains your accumulated experience, your consciousness, and all the information that comprises it.
And it looks pretty cool, that fucking show. But it’s a terrible show, again, because it’s under thought. It’s written probably by people who don’t have a deep grounding in science fiction. It’s set like 300 years in the future. Everybody, even 300 years in the future, the only thing people care about is looking hot and fucking.
That’s just not a reasonable future. We’re already seeing changes in sexual behavior. We’re barely in the future. 300 years from now, some people won’t worry about sex.
Others will want to have four percent body fat and amazing abs. There are always will be people who want to just do a lot of fucking. There will still be those people. But there will also be like 80 other kinds of conscious beings, none of whom are concerned with having abs and fucking. The end.
[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 