Rick Rosner: “People should be educated to be suspicious—but not stupidly suspicious. That is part of civic education. Another part should be learning how to tell the difference between a legitimate scientific paper or expert and a charlatan… Someone with even a bit of training can usually tell fairly quickly why a paper is bullshit.”
“Aging isn’t just physical decline; it’s a narrowing and sharpening of attention. You lose people, you lose illusions, and some drives blunt themselves. But memory—especially smell—sticks around because it once kept us alive. What changes isn’t meaning itself, but how selectively we carry it.”
“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.”
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.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner advises regular prostate checkups, PSA tests, digital exams; frequent ejaculation for prostate health, sharing humorous personal anecdotes. They discuss male sexuality’s evolutionary background, Rosner’s first-grade Columbus essay rejecting myth, his dry-hand sex practices, and his favorite academic challenges in algebra and statistics, highlighting pattern recognition and data privacy.
*Interview conducted in November, 2024.* Rick Rosner: So, here’s a story from high school. In high school, my friends Lon and Dave were cooler than me. They were good-looking guys—so good-looking, in fact, that one of them has a daughter who grew up to become a fairly major movie star. So, in high school, I …
*Interview conducted in November, 2024.* Rick Rosner: I’ve been feeling bad about our recent conversations because it’s mostly me complaining about Trump. So, I tried to think more philosophically or metaphysically for a moment. We’ve often talked about the principles of existence and things that can exist, but that made me wonder: what about things …
*Interview conducted October/November, 2024.* Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s up, buddy boy?! Rick Rosner: So, it looks... Iran looks like they tested a nuke a day or two ago. It’s not confirmed, but they had what reads on the Richter scale as an earthquake, except it’s not in a place that has earthquakes, and the timing …
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the year 2045? Rick Rosner: So, I thought we would talk, maybe in chunks, about the future moving forward. This is the same scheme as Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando, which is a novel about AI fucking transforming everything. He probably wrote it 20 years ago now. But with 2045, your …
Rick Rosner 