“Catching fake IDs was my favourite part of working the door. Maybe one in ninety tried to sneak in, but some nights it felt like everyone. The worst part was finding a 19-year-old surrounded by creeps who saw her inexperience. Stopping a fake ID sometimes meant stopping something worse.”
“But instead of the checks being for three hundred and fifty dollars, they are for three cents. Literally two and three cents. Carol took in a stack of checks that were more than an inch high—more than a hundred checks and they totaled $7. And that's the kind of residuals.”
AI replaces good work with bad work, yet people expect limitless growth. Rosner argues the real mistake is assuming human cognition is excellent. If consciousness is evolutionary rather than sacred, artificial systems could eventually reach our clumsy level. The question is not whether AI becomes conscious — but how competently.
"On a packed holiday flight, Rick Rosner watches an 11-hour coughfest unfold, his wife later testing positive for COVID. In conversation with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, he turns airborne contagion, toilets, penis enlargement, and aging eyes and ears into one anxious, darkly funny meditation on modern bodies trapped in crowded spaces."
Rick Rosner parcels Alien Earth into ten-minute rations, landing on the six children uploaded into super-strong synthetic adults. He doubts the show’s glossy mind-transfer fidelity by 2120, noting Nibs’s PTSD and delusional pregnancy after the Eye Midge attack. The Peter Pan naming frames ageless “Lost Boys,” adding textured worldbuilding; quirkiness matters. Alien Earth’s Maginot ship evokes the Maginot Line—impressive yet fatally bypassable. Rosner contrasts this care with Altered Carbon’s one-trick future. He then pivots to politics: a recent appeals-court blow to broad tariffs may temper inflation and reshape 2026 incentives, potentially sparing Republicans pain that higher prices could have delivered.
In this exchange, Jacobsen and Rosner discuss Marco Rubio’s constrained dissent within the Trump administration, highlighting the tension between personal conscience and partisan loyalty. Jacobsen expresses greater confidence in foreign leaders than in American officials, arguing that token objections, like Mitt Romney’s, matter less than substantive actions in defending truth.
In this conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner dissect the surreal overlap of American politics, global sport, and everyday life. Rosner riffs on FIFA’s World Cup “peace prize” diplomacy with Trump, linking symbolic awards to geopolitical tensions and a jittery U.S. economy. He contrasts the relative ease of childhood flying with today’s cramped, hyper-secured, COVID-risky air travel, weaving in deregulation and presidential responsibility. Extending the theme, Rosner argues that hollowed-out jobs and constant pressure erode the moral energy needed to sustain marriage, family, and broader social institutions, suggesting the arc of history is currently bending backward.
In this conversation, Rick Rosner walks Scott Douglas Jacobsen through his Temu and Alibaba adventures, where four-dollar floral purses and three-dollar brooches become raw material for art. He contrasts America’s lost costume-jewelry heyday in Providence with today’s China as “factory of the world,” an entrepreneurial dictatorship that rewards production while crushing dissent. Between critiques of U.S. militarism and Chinese industrialization, he describes building a bloodied-knees Jesus mosaic with Gorilla Glue and upcycling antique micromosaics into fake Elizabeth Locke-style pieces. Throughout, Carole hovers as recipient and muse, test audience for whether cheap Chinese goods feel like treasures or trash.
In this interview, Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen explore how emerging longevity technologies may reshape wealth, desire, and death. Rosner argues that as organ engineering and anti-aging interventions move from billionaires to millionaires, affluent boomers will buy extra years of life and libido, exacerbating generational inequality. He imagines pig-grown and hybrid synthetic organs, emergency brain-saving pumps, and a booming longevity industry. The conversation then shifts to his personal history: disastrous parties, missed awards, and meeting his future wife Carole as a semi-famous, overworked bouncer who gamed 1980s bar culture while stretching every dollar and contact lens.
In this Thanksgiving conversation, Rick Rosner talks with Scott Douglas Jacobsen about the enduring genius of Mel Brooks, from Young Frankenstein to Get Smart, and the changing sophistication of television from Hill Street Blues to today’s streaming era. Rosner laments no longer working for Kimmel, where legends like Norman Lear once appeared, and reflects on how creative legacies still shape culture. He riffs on AI’s multimodal future, humanoid robots, and the risks of systems with agency. He revisits his “meta-primes” idea on twin primes and information in the number line, and recalls favourite reading like Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
Rick Rosner 