How have the Tron movies each been disappointing in a universal way and in their own way?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner start with why the Tron films disappoint: the concept works, but 1982-era graphics limited what could be shown. Rosner pivots to sports and reality TV as owner-friendly machines—long seasons, brutal physical costs, and prize structures that feel stingy. They then jump to politics and media: the DOJ’s planned review of 5.2 million Epstein-related pages, document-dumping as ‘papering the opposition,’ and how narratives get laundered through bad-faith outrage. Finally, they dissect X’s post-Musk misinformation economy and connect vaccine denial to the U.S. measles surge, arguing the harm is preventable. In plain terms. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I do not have much to say about Tron except that this is the third in the series.

Rick Rosner: They have all been disappointing. 

Jacobsen: So here is the question: How have they each been disappointing in a universal way and in their own way?

Rick Rosner: The idea was perfectly reasonable — humans manage to build a cyberspace and then go into it. Maybe the first one was disappointing because the technology was barely there. Tron came out in 1982, when video games and computer graphics were still pretty primitive for what they were trying to show, so the tools for making video games and for portraying cyberspace on screen were limited.

Let us talk about college football for a second. Sports in general, and maybe game shows also.

The owners make the money. Athletes are highly paid, but considering the value they generate for the owners, they are barely fairly paid, if at all. Game shows are even worse. On Wwipeout, you have 24 contestants competing, and only one of them wins $50,000; the rest go home with bruises and memories.

The rest of them get the shit beaten out of them because it is an obstacle course where, if you are knocked off the course — and everybody is — you fall 15 to 20 feet into the water. People get fucked up, and it is brutal and miserable. On cooking shows like Chopped, only one person wins. They win just 10 grand, which is a considerable line item in the show’s budget, but not a big share of the total.

An episode of Chopped likely costs in the range of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to make — hard to know without insider figures — but if you estimate around $70,000 for an episode, the $10,000 prize is about 14% of the budget, which still seems chintzy. Only one person walks away with money. On some shows nobody walks away with money. On The Great British Baking Show, nobody wins money — the winner gets a cake stand, flowers, the title, and whatever opportunities come after.

Maybe if you stay on the show long enough, toward the end, you get a deal for a cookbook or something, but that does not come from the show itself.

In sports: when I was a kid, a college football season felt like eight or nine games.

Now it is generally 12 regular-season games, and with the expanded postseason, top programs can play several additional games. College football is possibly more brutal than pro football because the players play with more abandon. It is a lot of games for a sport that beats the fuck out of you.

The NFL went from 12-game regular seasons decades ago, to 14, then 16, and now 17 games. That is a lot for a sport that beats the fuck out of you.

Baseball has always been ridiculous. It was a 154-game season for a long time, and since the early 1960s it has been 162 games. At least it is not as physically destructive as football, but that is a long fucking season. It is great for the players who get to set records across a whole season, but it is a lot — all in service of the profit.

You have teams worth a billion dollars. Hockey and basketball both have 82-game seasons, and those are physically punishing sports. The main reason the seasons are so long is so the owners can make a lot of money.

It is not entirely fair to the players, and it is annoying. I am a bad fan, but even as a fan I do not want to track a team across 162 games over a seven-month season and then the playoffs. In baseball, the playoffs are ridiculous because baseball is maybe the most random — the most dependent on chance — of all the major sports. Over 162 games you might get a pretty clear idea of which teams are best, and then you mess it up with a single-game wild card play-in, then a three-game series, then a five-game series, and then two seven-game series.

Somebody did a study and only about one-third of the seasons end with the best team winning. People like the excitement and the unpredictability, but it still feels like nonsense that the best team only wins the championship about one-third of the time.

You could set up systems that let the best team win more reliably. You could declare the champion at the end of 162 games — probably the fairest approach. Or you could take the best American League team and the best National League team and have them play the World Series, which is how it worked about 70 years ago.

Jacobsen: News item: The United States Department of Justice is going to review 5.2 million pages of Epstein files. Thoughts on this? They will need hundreds of lawyers or offices to do it. The DOJ under Pam Bondi is going to work very hard to obscure anything bad about Trump. One way they are doing that is by presenting “5 million documents.” Is it really that many, or did they bring in a huge amount of extra material to obscure the worst parts and make them harder to find?

Rosner: It is called papering the opposition. In a legal action, if you are up against a big, powerful firm, they can bury you during discovery by delivering truckloads of documents, hoping you do not have the time, staff, or insight to find the two damaging pages hidden among hundreds of boxes. Something similar is going on here, where they hope the worst material…

Anything bad about Trump gets lost in the five million documents they claim they are going to release. Even in the smaller releases, they put out a photo of Bill Clinton in a swimming pool with (maybe) Ghislaine Maxwell — I forget — but he is in a swimming pool, and the implication is that he is on Epstein Island doing bad shit. Someone used photo recognition, and that swimming pool is not on Epstein Island — it is in Abu Dhabi at a fancy hotel. It has nothing to do with Epstein Island. I am not even sure Ghislaine Maxwell was there. It is designed to damage Clinton by association. It is bullshit. Clinton never went to Epstein Island. He flew on Epstein’s plane a lot. I do not know why — Trump flew on Epstein’s plane a lot too. I do not know why. Maybe rich people just borrow each other’s planes. I do not know.

But they will continue. Trump and the DOJ will continue to distract people from the damaging material in the files. The longer it goes on, the more MAGAs and right-wing pundits try to normalize what happened with Trump.

She got hired by CBS for two years and then Fox hired her again because she previously worked for Fox. She sued Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. Her name starts with a K and it was not coming to me. She was one of the moderators for Trump’s first 2016 presidential debate. She has been seen as a voice of reason. She is no longer a voice of reason. Her most recent comment was that she does not care if Trump got “a little handsy” with some of the girls.

Jacobsen: Megyn Kelly.

Rosner: There you go. They are going to draw this out. They are going to paper the room. They are going to give people an excuse structure for finding nothing gross about what Trump did.

Then they distract with stories like the massive child-care fraud case in Minnesota. They claim Somalis ran a multimillion-dollar scheme where they received millions of dollars and no children were cared for, and that Governor Tim Walz and Biden did nothing. Even though this has been prosecuted for years. There were whistleblowers for years. People were caught. Something like 70 people have gone on trial. The ringleader is not Somali. She is a woman named Amy Bock, who is just a regular white woman. People call her a “Karen” because she fits the stereotype.

The outrage over that is, among other things, racist. It is a distraction. Liberals counter by saying: what about the billions in PPP fraud — the big business loans that went out during COVID when businesses claimed financial stress?

The loans never had to be paid back if they were big enough. If you got a loan for $100,000, $200,000, or a million, you somehow did not have to pay it back — the loan effectively became a grant. Lance got a similar PPP loan for six or seven grand. For some reason, Lance, a tiny businessman, has to pay back the whole thing, probably with interest.

Trump has also been pardoning and giving clemency to massive fraudsters who defrauded people out of hundreds of millions, and in some cases more than a billion dollars. The pardons and clemencies mean they are no longer legally obligated to pay back the victims.

The whole thing is annoying, at the very least.

Jacobsen: News item: Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of JFK, has died of a rare form of leukemia. Any thoughts? 

Rosner: Just one. There was a guy on Twitter — William something, I do not know his last name — who tweeted that it was the vaccine, and if they had gotten her to him, maybe he could have fixed the “vaccine damage” using ivermectin.

I looked him up. People are going to say anything, and countless idiots will believe them. This guy was a doctor — he is no longer legally permitted to call himself a doctor because he lost his license. He is Canadian. He lost his license and the right to use the term “doctor,” but he still treats people somehow.

A lot of the anti-vaxxers are making a lot of money off it — with bullshit treatments, with nutritional supplements. There is an entire anti-vax industry where people make really good incomes off idiots. It is sad about Schlossberg. She was only 35, and she died of cancer — the way people do.

But every time a celebrity dies now, the scammers and grifters claim they “died suddenly” of “turbo cancer” or “vaccine damage.” They tweet this garbage out to — and Musk, before Musk, the worst purveyors of misinformation — and not just the worst, but thousands of people pumping bullshit onto Twitter. Many of them were suspended for spreading bullshit. Now, under Musk, he has brought them all back, and it is a free-for-all. All the good people have left — not all, but 95% of the good people have left.

Because X is a shithole of people spreading bullshit and hate, including Musk himself. Musk gets more unhinged every week on Twitter. White supremacists tweet constantly. Whenever a Black guy gets caught doing something heinous — or even if they are not exactly caught, but have just been painted as heinous

Musk throws it up there — things about how the white race is being replaced and that people need to act. Most of Musk’s posts now are white-supremacist talking points, and he gets away with it because he owns the platform. He was willing to spend around $44 billion to buy Twitter — now X — and lose most of it. If he tried to sell it today, he might recoup a third of what he paid, but he has so many billions that he does not care. He would rather have a megaphone to broadcast white-supremacist nonsense and make the place a gathering point for assholes.

Earlier last week, someone tweeted that a significant number of people on X can be presumed mentally ill because they believe genuinely delusional things. There are a not insignificant number of sincere flat-earthers on X now.

I am sure there are plenty of insincere flat-earthers who are just trolling, but to sincerely believe, at this point in human history, that the Earth is flat means you are a lunatic and your brain is not working right. But you do not have to be a flat-earther to be unhinged on X — you can be delusional in eighty other ways.

You can find peers, or people pretending to be peers, who will validate your delusion — either because it makes them money, because they think it is funny, or because they are just as deluded as you are.

A few years ago, before Musk, Twitter was a fun place where funny people — and I was among them — tossed jokes back and forth. You could read hundreds of jokes a day. Now those people are gone, and it is just a shithole.

Jacobsen: What parts of the current Twitter are positive?

Rosner: In addition to being fun, Twitter used to be a fast — not entirely reliable, but not entirely unreliable — source of breaking news.

Some breaking news was fake, like a celebrity death that was not real, but generally the news moving across Twitter was legitimate and arrived ahead of other sources. If you were careful and double-checked things, you could get news minutes — sometimes half an hour or forty-five minutes — before it appeared anywhere else.

What good that does, I do not know. People like knowing things first. Carol usually beats me to news — she tells me something she saw on her feeds before I see it. Or I tell her something I just saw, and she has already seen it.

There is a certain satisfaction in being the first to know something. But.

That kind of thing still happens on X sometimes, but it is swamped by the annoying, dishonest, braggy MAGA content.

It is nice when bullshitters get ratioed — when the remaining people on X who are not full of shit turn their attention to someone being a lying asshole and pile on. It does not usually stop them from being a lying asshole. Less than 10% of the time does someone caught lying take down their tweet. But it is still nice to see 99% of the comments under that tweet saying, “You are full of shit — here is what the truth is, and here is a link that confirms it.”

Those are the remaining things about X that are still okay.

Jacobsen: Measles cases in South Carolina have risen to 2,276 according to the state health department. Any thoughts?

Rosner: Nationwide there are around 2,000 cases. And it is completely unnecessary. We had measles eradicated until anti-vaxxers decided that measles is harmless and you do not need to vaccinate your kids, and we started losing herd immunity.

If more than 95% of kids are vaccinated, you have sufficient herd immunity. Once it drops under 90%, measles can proliferate because it is highly contagious. It can kill people; it can debilitate people. It does not have to kill you immediately — it can damage your immune system and you die of something else six months later. Out of 2,000 cases, maybe you will have 10 or 12 deaths.

Anti-vaxxers can say, “That is just the cost of being a kid. Some kids die.” But they did not have to die. Two thousand kids did not need to get sick. Out of those 2,000, hundreds did not need to have their immune systems compromised, or have their hearing damaged — or whatever else measles messes up — leaving them at risk of getting sick later.

Anti-vaxxers are bad at math, statistics, and empathy, and they have a bunch of ignorant talking points. One is, “It is only 2,000 cases and measles mostly does not kill you.” They always have dumb shit to say about every aspect of this. Some of those arguments would disappear if the number went from 2,000 cases to 20,000, and instead of 10 or 12 deaths, 100 kids died. Then some arguments would disappear — but they would invent new ones.

One argument is that before vaccines, people got measles and got better and it was fine. That is bullshit — it damaged a lot of people. There are cynical pundits and medical scammers, including RFK Jr., who supply the dumb arguments. They probably do not even believe them — they just feed them to the gullible.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Alvaro Pinot on Unsplash

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