“I set alarm clocks and scattered Legos across the carpet, then put the clocks across the room so I had to step on Legos to shut them off. The pain was supposed to wake me up. Instead, I stepped on Legos, turned off the clocks, and went back to bed.”
Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Rick Rosner about the nature of therapy, particularly couples counseling. Rosner shares his extensive experience in therapy, noting the importance of unbiased therapists. He reflects on the complexity of discussing current events, like the Israel-Palestine conflict, within therapeutic environments, recognizing the emotional weight it carries for many, including American Jews. Rosner expresses frustration over politicization in counseling and stresses the need for impartiality. He relates this dynamic to personal communication challenges with his wife, emphasizing the role of therapy in fostering constructive dialogue about personal and external issues, including political tensions, without ideological bias.
Rick Rosner: I do believe in magnetic personalities, though, because I live in a town of schmoozers. Do you know what a schmoozer is? Jacobsen: Yes. Someone who basically kisses up—a kind of social smooth-talker. Rosner: It’s Yiddish. Jacobsen: I wasn’t sure if it was in the general non-Jewish lexicon. Rosner: It is. My stepdad …
*Interview conducted in November, 2024.* Rick Rosner: So, naturally, I think that Big Bang physics is a theory that has not entirely caught up with observation. Everything is relatively new. Essentially, everything we know about the universe has been learned in the last 100 to 120 years. The farther away a galaxy is, the more …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1190: Is there more to it, or no?
Rick Rosner: In the Spike Jonze movie Her, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his phone’s operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Spoiler alert, but the movie is already nine years old? I believe it was released in 2015. One of the factors leading to their separation is that the operating system becomes increasingly frustrated with …
Rick Rosner: So I watched all the episodes of America’s Sweethearts, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is it about? Rosner: It’s part of that team. It messes you up physically. They looked at one young woman who had to get a hip replacement after three or four years of being on the …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 973: Dallas Cheerleaders and Centaurs
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: All right, so today I saw the term integrated cognition pop up. I looked it up, and I don't know how common a term it is, but it refers to AI, and it's what we call multimodal. It's kind of the way we think, which is we have inputs from a number …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 972: Analytic Systems and Integration of Cognition
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How has the landscape of bullshitting evolved in the early 21st century? It’s been about a quarter century. How has it changed? Rick Rosner: In general, in American culture, the main change in bullshitting is that about a quarter of American adults have been broken. It’s no secret. For political reasons and …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 971: The Landscape of Bullshitting
Rick Rosner: I like making political bets because I feel like I can find odds that are askew in politics, where I can't find them in sports. I'm not good enough to find that stuff in sports. Most people aren't. I found online odds on who's going to win the presidential debate. Biden and Trump …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 970: Betting on Biden or Trump
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The mind of God, informational cosmology, and what if the universe is processing information, but it's not actually creating anything associated with a mind? It's not really consciousness-associated, it's just information processing on a large scale, like information shuttling without any explicit purpose. Rick Rosner: I doubt that's the case, though it's …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 969: The Mind of God, a mind of a god, and not quite
Rick Rosner 