Ask A Genius 1574: Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Supreme, Brain Aging, AI Consciousness, and the Psychology of Serial Killers

In this wide-ranging conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner move from film analysis to neuroscience, AI consciousness, and the developmental pathways of serial killers. Rosner discusses Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet, before examining research on the brain’s five cognitive “ages” and growing expert unease about dismissing AI consciousness outright. The discussion turns to how declining neural integration affects human awareness and how this contrasts with the “as-if” consciousness exhibited by large language models. The pair then explore common patterns among serial killers, including escalating fantasy, early behavioral problems, impunity, and heterogeneous backgrounds.

Ask A Genius 1212: Patriot of the Year Latitude

Rick Rosner: Fox News named Trump "Patriot of the Year" tonight at some ceremony. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is that what they call it? Like their annual version of Time's "Person of the Year"? Rosner: I don't think it's an award that has existed before—unless I'm wrong. Cynical people on Twitter are saying this is just …

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Ask A Genius 924: Microfiche is not that much pain, Rick!

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about books. Say, four or five thousand years ago, the idea of a book wasn't a thing; you had scrolls. You had 1% of the population who were literate in advanced society at the time, like the Egyptians with the scribes. Print and press came around; you had …

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Ask A Genius 911: The Square Root Law of Mesh Networks

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: I was talking about the square root law of mesh networks, which states that the efficiency of people whose brains are linked is proportional to the square root of the number of people in the network.  Black box-ness. So, we see this with AI and Google Translate, where AI can be effective, …

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Ask A Genius 910: Rick’s Book is About a Celebrity

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: So, you should know that the main character is a celebrity and, to some extent, an industrialist who has used his celebrity to be the figurehead of a sizeable semi-insidious tech corporation, mainly in the 2030s; that is the period I am writing about. One of the things that he has access to …

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Ask A Genius 909: The Forever-Book In-Progress

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: So, we're still talking about notes from my novel in progress. The entertainment industry facilitates sociopaths; I think that's long been apparent, especially sociopaths who either are talented or claim to be gifted. There's the saying nobody knows anything in the entertainment industry, which refers to nobody knows what's going to be …

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Ask A Genius 908: American Morale and “Trump is a fucking idiot”

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: American morale; that'd be good. Rick Rosner: Two of me yammering ago, I talked about how Trump's rhetoric has gotten uglier and Republican party rhetoric, generally, has just gotten more divorced from reality and aggressive. We're talking about American morale, and I told my wife that the people interested in non-normal government …

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Ask A Genius 907: Simulations of Consciousness Before Consciousness

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: Some people say, or at least one person I read, that AI is a misnomer; it's just high technology. Calling it intelligence, artificial, or whatever you want to call it, it's just increasingly powerful technology. We have the same genetics as humans did 100,000 years ago. We're not getting any smarter biologically, …

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Ask A Genius 906: The Funk in Daily Life from Trump

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: So, you've been away for a couple months and plus you're up in Canada, so you don't get the daily barrage of awfulness that is US News. My wife Carole just had to turn off the news and leave the room yesterday, I think. Experts on cyber-attack and propaganda say that …

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