How would you feel after a dog death?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Rick Rosner about grief, geopolitics, and meaning across scales. Rosner reflects on euthanizing his elderly dog, Rosie, examining consciousness, suffering, and human limits over biology. The conversation widens to Trump’s saber-rattling over Greenland, tariff threats, and the constraints of military, constitutional, and geopolitical realities. Rosner argues deterrence logic undermines Greenland panic while warning about authoritarian drift and institutional fragility. Together, they frame personal loss, political risk, and cosmic insignificance through nested “matryoshka” layers, exploring religion, science, AI, and whether overarching worldviews are necessary for human flourishing.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How are you feeling after the dog death?

Rick Rosner: Today we put brown, Rosie, to sleep. She was about fifteen. We think it was cancer, though we never got a definitive diagnosis. She stopped eating a couple of days ago. We tried everything, including a prescription appetite stimulant—I think it was called Entyce—which you squirt into their mouth. We tried more than a hundred different kinds of food, and she was just done with food. I was able to get a little milk into her mouth, but she was losing weight and breathing rapidly. My wife thought it was time. I always want to try to squeeze out a few more days, but I do not think she had any more good days in her.

She seemed uncomfortable and confused. She looked hungry, but she would not eat. I assumed she was nauseated and in pain. That was it for the dog. It felt tougher this time than when we put Meg to sleep about eleven years ago, because with Meg it was clearly neurological. Her awareness seemed to be breaking down. We held on too long, and then she deteriorated sharply—confused, whimpering, unable to make sense of what was happening. Something catastrophic seemed to have happened.

With Rosie, her awareness felt intact. She was just physically failing. Even though she was not a bright dog, she still had the full consciousness of a dog. I do not think a less intelligent dog has much less subjective experience than a highly trainable one. That is what made it so brutal: shutting down a being who still felt present. We might have kept her going for a few more days with stronger anti-nausea medication, appetite stimulants, and syringes to push food into her, but that is no way to live.

It sucks. Humans have been breeding dogs for thousands of years. Dogs may live longer now than they used to, on average, but longevity has not been the main selection target the way size, coat, temperament, or working traits have been. In principle, you could select for longer-lived lines, but it is slow and complicated: you have to wait many years to know which animals truly live longest, and by then many of the best candidates—especially females—will be past breeding age. You might still be able to use sperm from an older male, but fertility and quality can decline with age. It is trickier than selecting for obvious traits in a single generation. Still, we could have prioritized lifespan more than we have.

Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the open threats of tariffs over Greenland by Trump?

Rosner: Trump is saber-rattling about Greenland, saying that Greenland cannot defend itself because it is part of Denmark.

Jacobsen: He is also claiming that representatives or troops from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland have traveled to Greenland. He framed this on Truth Social as a dangerous situation for the safety, security, and survival of the planet, accusing these countries of playing a very dangerous game.

He then tied this to tariffs, saying he plans to impose a 10 percent tariff on these countries starting February 1, with an increase to 25 percent on June 1. I have heard this rhetoric before. Maybe not in its full version, but he has been making these talking points for several days. It is bad, but it is not scarier than it was forty-eight hours ago. It is still plenty scary.

What do you think? 

Rosner: You seem more disturbed by it. 

Jacobsen: People who know more than I do, and whom I talk with, seem to treat this as a case where no more needs to be said. As I have alluded to elsewhere, this appears to be part of a broader, coherent pattern.

It does bring a kind of coherence to the first year of a second Trump term. Some Fox News commentators have argued that South America and Central America have “America” in the name, and therefore fall under an “Americas First” orientation. As stupid as that is, it reflects an emphasis on this hemisphere.

Seen that way, the pattern includes talk of annexing much or all of Greenland through purchase or coerced purchase, threats of escalation, floating the idea of making Canada a fifty-first state, changing geographic names like the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” against international norms, seizing assets off the coast via tankers, and the extraterritorial detention or abduction of foreign leaders, including the leader of Venezuela. He is not a pleasant character, but regardless, he is a leader of a foreign country.

There have also been threats involving Iran and Nigeria, including references to the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, but the emphasis now looks more coherent if you frame it as “America’s First” with an added annexationist impulse.

Rosner: That said, there are limits. Trump has a nickname, “TACO,” meaning “Trump Always Chickens Out.” He did authorize the detention of the Venezuelan leader, but Venezuela has about twenty-eight million people. The European Union has roughly five hundred million people and a modern, well-equipped military. I do not think he is going to war with NATO.

I could be wrong. He is reckless, and he is the most authoritarian-leaning president in U.S. history. But his claim that the U.S. needs Greenland for protection is nonsense. By treaty—first signed in 1941 and later reaffirmed during the Cold War—the United States already maintained multiple military bases in Greenland. At the height of the Cold War, there were numerous U.S. installations there. The strategic argument does not hold up.

We only have one base there now, but under existing agreements we can place additional U.S. military installations in Greenland if we choose. The interior of Greenland is largely uninhabited and covered by ice, with extremely harsh conditions, so most facilities would be coastal. In principle, the United States could station bases around much of the perimeter of the largest island in the world. Greenland has historically permitted this under treaty arrangements. Today they might be more cautious, given how unstable U.S. rhetoric has become, but it would still be more rational than the saber-rattling Trump is engaging in.

The claim that Greenland uniquely provides U.S. security, or that China or Russia might “take it over,” does not make much sense. Any such move would immediately involve Denmark and the European Union. From a nuclear-weapons standpoint, it makes even less sense. Nuclear-armed states already have submarines positioned within a few hundred miles of U.S. coastlines. Geographic proximity does not meaningfully change deterrence dynamics. The argument that Greenland’s location creates some special vulnerability fails both from a nuclear warfare perspective and from a conventional military one. Yes, it is scary.

Jacobsen: But do you think Trump would actually take action?

Rosner: He did not take military action against Iran. He issued threats and claimed he would help the Iranian people, but he did not strike Iran or intervene militarily. He later suggested that his posture reduced internal repression there, though that claim is hard to verify.

Some people online argue that Trump betrayed Iranian protesters by encouraging them rhetorically and then failing to act. They took him at his word and expected support that never came. This feeds into the idea behind the nickname “TACO”—“Trump Always Chickens Out.” That said, outcomes are not fully predictable. He did authorize the detention of Venezuela’s president, but he did not intervene militarily in Iran. It could go either way.

Anyway, the death of one very old dog is nothing compared to the possibility of intercontinental war.

Jacobsen: Would the military follow an order to attack or seize Greenland? 

Rosner: Probably. They followed orders aimed at regime change in Venezuela, and they followed directives from civilian leadership. The harder question is whether there is a point where they would refuse and instead turn to constitutional mechanisms.

Under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, if a majority of the cabinet determines that the president is unfit to serve, they can initiate removal. In practice, that seems unlikely. In his first administration, Trump had some cabinet members who were willing to resist him. In a second term, the cabinet appears to be composed almost entirely of loyalists. It is difficult to imagine them objecting to an order involving Greenland, however reckless.

As you said, it is a time of uncertainty. 

Jacobsen: Take three nested frames—like matryoshka dolls. The first is the dog dying. In the context of the larger society or the nation, it is not a major tragedy. Locally, it is a deep one.

Though maybe not even a tragedy, because it was her time, sadly.

Second frame: the potential for intercontinental war, as you were noting. Our small lives exist in the middle of that.

Third frame: our thin layer of life on the surface of the Earth, set against galactic time. What do you make of meaning in life when you look across those scales?

Rosner: I will start with the largest frame. I think life on Earth will persist. I do not think we will obliterate ourselves. I do not think artificial intelligence will wipe us out. I think conditions on Earth will change dramatically, and relatively quickly, but life will continue.

In many ways, life will remain familiar. Despite the very high rate at which humans are driving extinctions—often described as a sixth mass extinction, comparable in scale to past events, including the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous—I think most life on Earth will survive. There will still be vast amounts of microbial life and insects. In terms of sheer numbers, bacteria and beetles will continue to dominate.

Within a few hundred years, as humans increasingly integrate advanced technologies, including AI, many of today’s major problems will likely be addressed or transformed. Historical crises have often seemed insurmountable in their time. In 1900, for example, cities were overwhelmed by horse manure; by 1930, the problem had disappeared due to technological and social change rather than direct planning.

On the scale of life in the universe—a fourth nesting doll—it probably does not matter much, from a cosmic perspective, what happens on Earth. There may be millions or billions of other civilizations across the universe, whether now, in the past, or in the future. Even if advanced civilizations eventually influence their environments on large scales, the self-destruction of a single young civilization would not be a defining event for the universe as a whole.

From the standpoint of the universe itself, even our worst possible outcomes would not be its greatest tragedy.

Going back to the next-largest matryoshka, which is life on Earth: a lot is going to change. We can hope that whatever we become in combination with advanced AI will retain some respect for Earth’s history—its evolutionary history and its cultural history. Our future selves may look back on us as primitive or unsophisticated. They may find our cultural products dull or obvious, not really “art” in the way they understand it, much as we can watch animals for a while but eventually lose interest because their behavior is predictable.

That brings us back to the next matryoshka down: the current political situation with Trump and the rest of the world.

It is a serious problem. Someone recently circulated an article I have not yet read about how Hitler used constitutional mechanisms to consolidate power in Germany, becoming a dictator within a short period of time without staging a coup or technically violating the law. He used the existing structures of the German state to place himself in a position where he ruled for twelve years, led Germany into catastrophic war, and oversaw the mass murder of millions of people beyond battlefield casualties. That historical parallel is unsettling.

I am hoping Trump does not have the same leverage. He has already served one full term, and he is now into a second. Public opinion may matter here. Polling suggests that a majority of Americans view the first year of his second term negatively, and his approval ratings appear historically low for this stage of a presidency. Whether that translates into meaningful constraint is an open question.

We have midterm elections coming up. At the same time, he has issued threats and, according to reports and rumors, mobilized military units in response to alleged unrest. For example, there have been claims about deploying troops to Minnesota, despite no evidence of insurrection or widespread disorder there. Similar deployments occurred in the past and were later reversed when they proved unnecessary. Minnesota does not appear to require a military presence now either.

There are also reports that immigration enforcement resources have been concentrated there. Protests themselves have largely been peaceful, with participants deliberately avoiding giving the administration any justification for escalation. Of course, Trump does not require an actual excuse to claim disorder exists.

The question is whether Trump will actually be able to carry out the more serious actions he talks about, including something as extreme as canceling the midterm elections, which are now less than ten months away.

I do not know. The United States is roughly five times the population of Germany in the 1930s. We have a different constitutional structure and a very different political system from the one that enabled Hitler’s rise. Hitler came to power with minority support, using parliamentary mechanisms in a fragile democracy.

Trump was also elected without a majority of the popular vote. The margin was narrow, but it was still a minority. That matters for legitimacy, but the institutional context is not the same.

If we step back to the smallest matryoshka—the death of an old dog—that is a quiet, ordinary tragedy. In 2026, we are still subject to biology. That will not always be true. Over time, humans may gain more control over aging, disease, and death. But the technological tools we use to overcome biological limits could also destroy us. We may defeat biology and then be crushed by technology. That is a different nesting doll altogether. Thoughts?

Jacobsen: I do not know. From the longest time scale and the largest magnitude, we do not matter. Locally, we matter for a while, if we are lucky.

That perspective can make faith-based worldviews look like reflections of a human need to strive in a noble sense, but also potentially delusional when they deny physical reality.

Rosner: If you are a shoemaker in fourteenth-century Europe, do you need a worldview that explains everything? Probably not. But the Church provided an all-encompassing framework that offered comfort, moral structure, and meaning.

Now consider a software developer in 2026 who faces the possibility of being made obsolete by AI. Does that person spend much time thinking about the universe and why we are here? It depends. The medieval shoemaker might be periodically forced to think about those questions through religious ritual. The modern coder is not obligated in the same way.

Most of the time, neither the shoemaker nor the coder needs to think about the biggest questions. But the coder is reminded in other ways—through science fiction, television, and popular culture. Watching Star Trek or anime, thinking in a half-philosophical way about big questions. For that person, science and science fiction provide the broader framework.

That framework is valuable, but it is not essential. One can live without an all-encompassing worldview, even if it is sometimes useful to have one.

Rosner: It is still worthwhile to try to understand what the whole situation is, even if we never fully get there. It is also good to have moral structure. Religion has excused a lot of terrible things, and it is currently being used to excuse Trump and much of what he is doing in the United States. Beyond that, I do not know how you would even begin to do a proper accounting. 

Jacobsen: Has religion done more good than harm? 

Rosner: I do not know.

Jacobsen: Has science done more good? 

Rosner: I would probably argue yes, in the sense that our lives are materially better than those of people three hundred years ago. At the same time, most of us alive now will still die the same way the roughly one hundred billion humans before us have died. Does that make a difference? In the overall scheme of things, probably not much. I do not know.

I have an addendum:

I have a fifth matryoshka. I am watching The Running Man—the new Glenn Powell version—which is a remake of the Schwarzenegger film from the 1980s, itself based on a Stephen King novel written under the name Richard Bachman. The original was a big, cheesy Schwarzenegger movie. This one is better, but it is hard to care very much about a fictional character’s fictional world when you have just lost your dog.

Carol wanted to stop watching it. Part of that is taste, but part of it is that the movie depicts a fascist dictatorship in the United States—run through a media conglomerate intertwined with government. That is unsettling. Fascism, as it originally developed starting in Italy in 1922, was explicitly a partnership between industry and government, presented as a force of national destiny: powerful, efficient, and ruthless. Play along and the country prospers; resist and you are crushed. The Running Man presents that kind of structure, and Carol does not like it.

So there is a tension. I do not want to enjoy a movie while I am grieving the dog, and I am enjoying it less. At the same time, Stephen King is a very vocal critic of Trump. He is a fiction writer, not a deep political analyst, but he does not need to be. It does not take a political genius to see many of the ways Trump is dangerous. Even when King wrote the book in the early 1980s—more than forty years ago—he was already pointing out, in pulp-fiction form, some of the directions society seemed to be heading.

Jacobsen: Do you want to finish the Ron Hoffman thread?

Rosner: I think I was basically done. There may have been a few missing words at the end, but the thought was finished.

I do have another idea. Political systems—nations and governments—are a bit like Turing machines. They are programs that run until they reach a halting state, or until they break.

That is what the United States feels like to me right now. The Founding Fathers, starting in 1789, designed a system meant to protect individual liberty and democratic choice, with many safeguards built in. That system ran relatively well for more than two centuries. Eventually, though, it encountered a combination of political movements, corruption, social change, and technologies like social media that exposed its weaknesses. It remains to be seen whether it can be repaired.

I am still fairly optimistic. We will know more as we approach the midterms. But it feels like a system that ran until its failure modes were finally triggered. Ancient Rome ran until corruption hollowed it out. Other systems have followed similar patterns.

England, by contrast, is still running. It has taken hits—it was damaged by Brexit, which was driven by misinformation and demagoguery—but it did not collapse into a cult of personality. England survived two world wars, transitioned from monarchy-centered rule to parliamentary democracy, and remained intact.

So it remains an open question whether the United States can unbreak itself. The constitutional mechanisms designed by the Founders may still give us a chance to survive politically. If we do not change anything, though, we may simply break again.

The world has changed enormously in the past 240 years. The Constitution has been amended many times—twenty-seven amendments so far—but we have never held a second constitutional convention. In theory, a new convention could fix a lot of problems. In practice, the same actors who are currently breaking the system would be present there as well, and they could make things worse.So we are probably stuck with the system we have. One of the most damaging developments, in my view, was the Citizens United decision, which effectively equated money with speech. That fundamentally distorted democratic processes.

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 Florian Schindler on Unsplash

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