On Podcasts and Governance with Rick Rosner

According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.

He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.

Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.

Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube. Here we – two long-time buddies, guy friends – talk about his new podcast appearance and human institutions.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you’re going to be on a podcast tomorrow and you’re going to be talking about economics.

Rick Rosner: Yeah, even though I’m not super qualified but I know the topic is that Biden’s spending is not cheap; 1.8 trillion I think on infrastructure or I don’t know… anyway, a lot, trillions of bucks. The US has a third of a billion people. So stuff costs a lot of money. I know because I’ve read and it makes sense that US can pay for anything; just has to print money to do it. It’s not like we’re going to run out of money. We may run out of the authorization for money because Congress is full of assholes but we can always make more money. The risk of printing a lot of new money is inflation because if you suddenly double the amount of money that there is which has never been done or maybe only in cases of hyperinflation in other countries but the US has never doubled the amount of money. If you did, then you’d expect for there to be double the amount of money in people’s wallets and for the price of everything to basically double.

The Republicans are always yelling we’re going to run out of money but that’s not the risk, the risk is inflation. I mean that’s what I know and then I’m sure I’ll be corrected by people who know more tomorrow but I was thinking about the future of capitalism, communism, socialism, and all the different isms and was trying to come up with a name for the system I think we’re moving towards and I came up with ‘Illusionism’. Throughout history, humans have behaved as if they have agency, have the ability to decide what to do and have the power to act upon it and all economic systems are more or less based on that idea humans but we are moving into an era of reduced human agency because we’re no longer going to be the smartest things on the planet.

Now AI is kind of oversold as being smart right now but humans plus AI which we’re not really at yet, the plus part. We have AI, we can use it but we’re not really merged with it but we will become more intimately linked with it and the people who are more linked will be smarter and basic humans won’t be the smartest thing and that means humans will have less agency. Even though humans have less agency, the economy of the world will still for the near and mid future depend on humans doing business; buying things, making things, and being paid. Our economies will have to keep kind of looking like they did and working the way they have even as humans become less valuable and stuff becomes cheaper because the new wave of technology will continue to reduce the prices of most things. I mean we haven’t seen it now inflation throughout the world for the past couple years but on average things get cheaper because it becomes cheaper to make things.

So you got things getting cheaper, you have humans becoming less valuable but humans will still want to do human things. The economy I think will become kind of an illusion that it’ll maintain various illusions that humans are worth what you pay them to work, humans will keep getting paid, humans will keep working, what they get keep getting paid for will kind of be less valuable but they’ll still get keep getting paid as if it is valuable, things will still cost stuff but there’ll be an illusion that certain things are valuable when they’re really just super cheap crap. So it’ll be okay to pay humans so they can buy stuff but the idea that human are valuable and the shit that they’re buying is valuable will become more of an illusion. So I call it illusionism. I should talk to somebody who actually understands economics in the future so they can tell me whether I’m full of shit or not.

Jacobsen: Where is this podcast?

Rosner: It’s streaming TV, it’s a thing called pod TV and for a while once a week I talk for an hour with a bunch of other people. Some of them are impressive. Well actually, the one impressive guy for sure is the former Comptroller General of the United States. He’s a guy who knows what he’s talking about. And then some other guys who do seem pretty knowledgeable and ladies. We talk about the state of media and when I get to do an economics hour we talk about economics and I try not to say anything too stupid and try not to talk too much when it’s something I don’t know much about.

Jacobsen: How long you’ve been doing this?

Rosner: I don’t know, months and months.

Jacobsen: Are they online now?

Rosner: I guess, I don’t know really how you access it but they’ll give me an hour if we want to do an hour a week if that’s something that you would find interesting. They claim they have hundreds of thousands of viewer. I don’t think they’re lying, I just think they’re a very tiny kind of TV, whatever it is, streaming TV deal. I don’t think they have hundreds of thousands of viewers tuning into me and these other people. I think it’s hundreds of thousands in the aggregate and I’m not sure what the aggregate is whether it’s per week, per day, or per month. If we could do a show where we talk about shit like we do, I think we’d probably have to fill an hour but I’m not sure about that because I think for the purposes of being consistently interesting, I think a half hour is plenty at least to start. Is that something you’d be interested in?

Jacobsen: I mean I could probably try it I guess. How did you find out about this?

Rosner: They emailed me a while ago and said that one guy had heard that I was smart and thought let’s have a smart guy on and so far I haven’t been kicked off. Anyway, just check out PODTV.

What do you think about illusionism?

Jacobsen: I think its part of an ongoing philosophical debate but yeah I think the general idea that we think we are in charge has been such a powerful force driving a lot of behavior… I think there’s an assumption by calling an illusionism that free will is more or less an illusion in some sense because empirically I think that’s an unknown so far.

Rosner: I’m not arguing against free will. I’m arguing against free will be harder to exercise in the future whether or not it exists. Independence from the forces around you is just going to be tough. People are going to be knocked around and manipulated. Is that reasonable?

Jacobsen: Yeah, I think the structures are going to be more rigid at that control behavior than before. I mean before it was more nature so it’s less conscious, now it’s societies and technology and electronic grids and software and that sort of funneling people in certain ways and that’s much more directed than humans just in the natural environment.

Rosner: Do you have a better term like when you think of capitalism is a crappy term; communism is a crappy term because they’re clunky. Capitalism is like five syllables.

Jacobsen: Yes, I mean you always have to add –ism.

Rosner: Yeah, that stupid -ism is just… Is there a better term for this weird kind of puppet economy of the future?

Jacobsen: String-ism?

Rosner: It feels like lubrication-ism or so, like you just got to keep it going.

Jacobsen: The way it all works. It’s just a limit on human behavior in some ways.

Rosner: We call it idiocracy because I mean the movie captured a lot of how it seems like it might be in that people continue to have their needs met even though the people are super dumb and shitty and their needs are met in super dumb and shitty ways which isn’t fair to the people of the future it’s not like people will be dumber it’s just that other stuff will be smarter.

Jacobsen: Yeah, that’s fair.

Rosner: I’m not even sure that the consumerism side of it, another –ism, will be the most important aspect of it, the way it’s been for the past century.

Jacobsen: I think we’re going to have a new form of capitalism where it’s less centered around continuous or infinite growth. We’re going to hit a cap and basically that’s going to come around like really good farmland and minerals for circuits and things like this and battery parts but it’ll be kind of like there’ll be a really increased sophistication. A decrease in the growth level of capitalism but there’ll be a lot more social safety nets. So people will be valued less relative to technology more but the fact that people live longer and healthier, artificially value their own lives more and so people become more dependent on systems. So you have this kind of a really advanced form of the Nordic models where you have sort of capitalism with a lot of breaks and then the social systems but the social systems will have the kind of medicine and stuff that’ll be so advanced that you can’t even call it Nordic, it’ll be a step beyond that.

Rosner: So what do you think will be the forces limiting growth? People making fewer babies?

Jacobsen: People making fewer babies, just land to be used on the earth. I mean if you kind of unwrap the sphere of the earth into a flat plane it’s not a lot left to kind of take. I mean climate change is expanding the water, so the surface of the earth is actually shrinking and the number of people continues to grow, so the usable areas of land are also decreasing. We’re also using a lot more resources and so all the types of things that require land just food, places for mining, minerals that we need…

Rosner: You want human enterprise to be constrained in some ways to help fight climate change; do you see that as being one of the limiters on growth?

Jacobsen: That will be one of the limiters. There will be disinformation campaigns as there are now to try to fight for the unlimited growth kinds of capitalism but something like a sustainable-ism maybe where you have a little bit of socialism, you have a little bit of capitalism, and then you have something else with a term I don’t even know to put to it that is just this third element.

Rosner: What about people living more and more virtually towards the end of the century?

Jacobsen: Yeah, I think it’s happened since the 1990s, it just happened in front of a screen. I mean these North American kids, they’re either on Tik Tok or playing video games, or watching movies; that’s like a majority of their waking hours outside of school probably.

Rosner: What about the concentration of wealth where just people can’t afford shit because all the old people have all the fucking money?

Jacobsen: Well that’s also a fact. It just depends on whether or not authoritarianism or democracy wins out internationally. If people would prefer less uncertainty then they’ll opt for totalitarianisms of various kinds like light to strong and then if they opt more for sort of a free roaming society, where it’s more of an evolved form of like direct democracy, where people don’t need representatives because they can just use their computer rather than getting someone to go like just sitting on a horseback and buggy back in the day so you needed a representative but if you don’t need that anymore because the functional limits of distance between people and what they want people to do for them or say centralized government then you just get rid of representatives all together and then you can vote for projects as you need them. It’ll be almost like a democracy leaning a little bit more to a form of anarcho-syndicalism.

Rosner: That sounds like Corey Doctorow.

Jacobsen: Yeah, and he’s good, he’s very good as a futurist. He really knows his stuff. I’ve interviewed him and it was a great interview. So those kind of frontline fights really sort of nuanced technology, legal, and science kind of questions in battles that are fought between corporations and individuals and nations and groups are going to be those deciding factors that it’s just a small portion of people that really know a lot about that. It’s a weird fight, it’s like a shadow War happening where none of us even see it and let alone understand it because you have to be constantly updated about it.

Rosner: What’s the syndicalism part of it? Is that people forming their own alliances?

Jacobsen: Yes, basically, syndicates. Two or more people or larger groups of people basically formulating ways they want to organize on projects.

Rosner: So it’s gloppy anarchy; it’s like lava lamp anarchy where people come together to form. It’s not just every man for himself, it’s people forming groups to solve specific problems.

Jacobsen: Yeah but I still think there will be something akin to nation states although they’ll be greatly diminished with this kind of direct democracy. It’s not nostalgia but it’s sort of having a core structure. It’s almost like as if states were fluid but the United States was rigid.

Rosner: Okay and then there will still be some stuff that government might be better at doing than anarcho-syndicalism.

Jacobsen: A 100%. There are very good examples some of the places like public healthcare, the US Post system is amazing I’m told.

Rosner: It is even with a Trump appointee trying to fuck it up.

Jacobsen: Yeah it is amazing.

Rosner: I love the US Postal Service. They don’t always do right by you but they outperform your expectations.

Jacobsen: Yeah and so I think we have a lot more internal fluidity, overall rigidity like a skeleton framework of a nation and you could call it a nation because there still will be the United Nations and so on. So you’ll have representatives in that sense but sort of a divergence of like middle management between International systems and National systems. The UN will still be functioning but I think the internal to nation things will be a lot more gloppy. The ones that are still totalitarian or gone to theocracy or whatever and I think all those systems like health care and post and new things that will come about that’ll be so mastered, that having a centralized government formulate them and run them just makes more sense, say personalized Healthcare rather than just Healthcare.

Your personal data being locked away in some kind of like quantum encrypted cloud; that I think could all be sort of considered something like a Nordic plus. That would be a next step. So maybe I wouldn’t call it Nordic-ism but they do provide a framework that is workable and they tend to have the highest quality of life of any set of societies and then women are more free. And I think that is probably the best benchmark of whether or not a society’s healthy or not.

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