Kirk Kirkpatrick and Rick Rosner on Superempowerment
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/02
*The interview was conducted on February 13, 2024.*
Rick G. Rosner earned high scores on tests by high-range tests 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. Kirk Kirkpatrick scored at 185 (S.D. 15), near the top of the listing, on a mainstream IQ test, the Stanford-Binet. He is the CEO of international telecommunications firm MDS America Inc. Here we talk about the continuance of the era of superempowerment.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we are back after a few years with a conversation with Rick Rosner and Kirk Kirkpatrick. Last time we talked, we talked about what you termed Kirk, the American Disease, and Rick, Superempowered. Kirk, have you had any updates to your definition of this idea of the American Disease?
Kirk Kirkpatrick: The biggest update is that I think Rick’s term is much better than mine. I am not that certain that it’s limited to the United States anymore. I have seen it in a lot of places, internationally. So, I think it is spreading all over the world.
Rick Rosner: Yes, we talked before we started taping, reminding me that we discussed this in 2017 [Ed. “Superempowered: How We Turned Into A Nation (And A Planet) Of Asshole” with Rick and follow-up with Kirk and Rick, “Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Kirk Kirkpatrick and Rick Rosner on the “American Disease” and “Super Empowerment”], so it is seven years later and seven years worse. I think what we talked about back then – you reminded me – was people choosing their truths or choosing out of big, messy balls of facts, cherrypicking facts. It is worse. In that, partisans promote lies, now, as truth, unapologetically.
Kirkpatrick: Exactly, that’s a good way of putting it. I’m unsure, Rick, whether that is a cause or a symptom. For any of that to work, they need compliant people willing to suspend rational faculties, which is what I am calling. It has become bizarre.
Rosner: Yes, propaganda has a huge hand in this. Russia is the king of propaganda.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: Social media carried propaganda, and Russia’s pushing of discord and disruptive BS into the Western democracies is increasingly blatant.
Jacobsen: It is. I don’t know if you’ve followed what has happened in Germany. They had an instance of the far-rightwing party, which has become rather powerful, having a kind of a meeting with ultra-right nationalists talking about the mass deportation of people who have already been admitted into Germany into some of the, what they call CDU, what would be the American Republicans. It was more of the AfD or Alternative for Germany, a rightwing party. It has achieved the majority in a couple of provinces. It had become powerful.
Rosner: I didn’t see this, but it was over in England and Belgium. I do a couple of shows every couple of weeks with my Trumpy friend.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: He thinks that Europe is in constant danger from Muslim immigrants.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: I was just over there in a fairly rough part of London. Yes, you see a lot of people who are apparently Muslim because Europe, at this point, is – what? – 10% Muslim compared to the US, which is 1% Muslim. I saw people going about their business. They had a head covering. They seemed the same as everybody else on public transportation, not sending off a hostile vibe. People come to the US and European countries to make a better life, not to take over the country. You’ve got 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. With that many people belonging to a demographic, you’re going to get some a-holes. But the idea that they are this force that is trying to take over the world is crazy BS.
Kirkpatrick: Of course, it is. I would like to give you a rather amusing and true example of exactly what you’re talking about: this idea of economics as the reason for moving. I was born and raised in a small town in North Georgia. It was in the Bible Belt. Until I left, it was a dry county. They eventually allowed you to sell beer in packaged stores in the county’s main town. It was no blacks, no Catholics. It was as rural backwoods as you can get. In the 70s, it was dead. Everybody left. There was no employment. A guy brought in a railroad car made out of glass. He started something called the Blue Ridge Scenic Railroad. It took people up through the mountains.
Rosner: Nice.
Kirkpatrick: It attracted tourists. Because of this, this woman started a mountain antique store. That took off. It attracted that type of store. Pretty soon, there were several of these on the main street and some decent restaurants. Now, here is the killer: the woman who started the antique place was gay. The entrepreneurial people that she attracted were predominantly gay, including restaurant owners and things like this. What has happened is that this backwoods, Georgia Bible Belt, redneck town is an LGBTQ hotspot for Georgia right now? So, these people didn’t move up there to change society. They moved to economics. They didn’t change their society either. I have to agree with Rick. When I was in London, I spent ten years living in the Middle East. I am comfortable with Muslims. I sought out Muslim barber shops because they do quite a good job with your hair. As Rick said, there are people out there trying to make a living in an economically advantaged place. That’s all they’re there for. Also, when I was in Berlin, I met a Syrian refugee who stashed away money while he was working in Kuwait. It brought the money into Germany when he got into Germany. He opened this Syrian restaurant and employed 8 Germans.
Rosner: I have another argument about what to worry about. In 2008, there were probably roughly the same number of Muslims in the world as now: maybe 1.3 billion instead of 1.4 billion. In 2008, there were zero smartphones. Now, there are 7 billion in the world. I have a buddy in a bunch of tech fields who says by the year 2100; there will be a trillion AIs in the world. Not all of them are conscious; none are your robot girlfriend. If you are worried about something disrupting the world, I would worry about tech more than I would worry about immigrants. That tech will outstrip immigration, particularly in America, where our immigration issue is based on a much lower percentage of immigrants than across Europe.
Kirkpatrick: As I like to point out to people, as I think about history, I cannot think of a society that was destroyed because it took in immigrants. I can think of more than one or two that became very xenophobic, and that helped in their fall. But I don’t know that they just perished because they took in too many immigrants.
Rosner: I have another statistic. A hundred years ago, America had 14% non-native-born people at the turn of the century. Now, it is 14% non-native-born people. We’re not being overwhelmed.
Kirkpatrick: It was the Germans in the late 1800s that were overwhelming us, then it was the Irish. Of course, the Chinese have been overwhelming us for years. Our first immigration faults were against the Chinese. So, they still haven’t taken over in 150 or 200 years down the line. They’re still trying [Laughing]. Immigration and this whole idea are, as Rick hasn’t said explicitly but has implied a big, nothing burger. It is not that big of a deal. It has become blown up to where it is a big deal for both sides. ‘Our borders are porous.’ Seriously? Have you been to any other borders? By the way, do you think having a non-porous border helps? The Israel-Palestine border was pretty damn strong. Yet, people got through it.
Rosner: You can see that border if you watch World War Z. In the Brad Pitt zombie movie, they show the wall. There is a whole scene of this 30-foot wall that Israel built around a lot of Gaza. It is a crazy frickin’s wall. It outdoes anything that we have on the border, wall-wise.
Kirkpatrick: My point: Not to mention, I like to take the bigger vision. If I am looking for this strict border, really strong ones, where will I find them? North Korea-South Korea is one of them. That is not the place for me. Iran-Iraq is, probably, another one. So, places with not-so-strict borders, like Canada and the US or all of the EU, tend to be nice places to live. That is my point with a lot of this stuff. I don’t know whether the media is the cause or the media is the result of people wanting to be scared.
Rosner: Especially in the last week with the Biden report by the special counsel, Hur, liberals like me have been going crazy about both sides-ism. Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show after nine years away. In his first show last night, which was funny, it made me and a bunch of liberals upset because he did a lot of sides-ism. Where both candidates are old, both of them make verbal slipups, and Trump says nonsensical stuff. But Trump is much more despicable and, I believe, unsuitable to be president based on his record than Biden. But Biden, the media, including Jon Stewart, often treats them as equals.
Kirkpatrick: Exactly, that’s patently, more than this, an example of what he is talking about here. Even take a step back if we take a step back, you are talking about a 77-year-old man who eats junk food a lot and an 81-year-old man who works out and is in considerably better health than the 77-year-old man. On the idea of being old, they’re essentially matched up. As Rick pointed out, one is incompetent and seems to lack a moral compass. Other than what is “good for me.” The other guy is a man who went into the vice presidency with a net worth of $365,000 or something dollars (US) after being a senator for 30 years. It is incredible.
Rosner: So, I would have to think Biden has a higher net worth than that.
Kirkpatrick: He does now.
Rosner: I misheard.
Kirkpatrick: He wrote a book while he was vice president that sold, as you can imagine, like crazy. They became millionaires while he was the vice president, in the same way the Obamas became millionaires.
Rosner: Yes, when you leave office, after holding high office, I think Bill and Hillary Clinton were broke when they left the White House from all the legal bills. After a few years of speeches and books, they had a net worth of $ 100 million or something crazy.
Kirkpatrick: They were making $50,000 per speech, $150,000 per speech, easily, and books. One of my first trips to China was in 2006. I have pictures of going into a bookstore. There is a big table where they are featuring Clinton’s My Life book in Chinese. It is not on the shelf. It is in the middle of the store on a big table featured as the book. He must have sold a tremendous amount. That wasn’t in Beijing. That was in Chengdu.
Rosner: This argues against corruption. In the four years Biden was out of office between being VP and President, he and Jill Biden made, through speeches and books, $ 16.5 million. Why would a guy who has been in politics for almost 50 years at that point understand the rules and has engaged in proper behaviour his whole career? Why would that guy jeopardize everything by making ridiculous, corrupt deals through his kid?
Kirkpatrick: It is silly. It is absolutely silly. Whose kids are we talking about? I’m sorry. Are these the people prohibited from running a charity because they are self-dealing? They do not compare in any way at all; it is ridiculous. But the point about what we’re talking about is that even though it is ridiculous. It is not. We are surrounded by people who absolutely believe it to be true.
Jacobsen: Is this sourced to more long-term trends around what is in the education system or what is kept out of the education system over decades?
Rosner: To me, it points in the direction that people in the future are going to need help from technology to figure out the world.
Kirkpatrick: Yes. That’s a good way of putting it.
Jacobsen: What would be some of these first areas of human understanding of this world, an average person on the street?
Rosner: There have been a lot of articles and talk in TV news about not being able to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake. At first glance, that can be the case. But if you scrutinize stuff, you can generally figure out what is real and what is bullshit unless you are being willingly gullible.
Kirkpatrick: Plus, there are companies now developing, several companies, AI systems that detect AI fakes. So, it is hard to push one by somebody or some organization because of the software detection. In the same way, these large language models can be very good at writing poetry in Urdu. They can be good at looking at what Rick is talking about, which is the hallmark of the fake and identifying it as it pops up if it is an AI-generated video. It is not real. You might have them in your glasses in the not-too-distant future.
Rosner: I picture people having Jiminy Crickets on their phones. Little superegos that help them make the best decisions.
Kirkpatrick: I have been testing out Apple’s Vision Pros. They are literally mindblowing. I can certainly see where you could have a pair of glasses on and its processing. You see a video. It says, “Nope, this is fake” in the glasses itself. It tells you. “This is fake.” The glasses would be your phone or sunglasses.
Rosner: I am on Twitter a lot. In the past week, I have had several accounts that have started actively commenting on my tweets. Their comments are strangely bland and slightly off-point. I attributed it to them being from other countries and maybe not native English speakers. What I have concluded is that they are AI accounts whose job is to go around and comment on tweets. I have no idea why. I don’t know who is putting these accounts out there. But they seem to be there.
Kirkpatrick: They’re probably dropping words for an algorithm. I haven’t been active on X or Twitter lately.
Rosner: It is terrible and swampy and full of lunatics.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] That’s why.
Rosner: [Laughing].
Kirkpatrick: If I see one or two people writing something making sense, it is like they’ve flown into a pool of piranhas.
Jacobsen: What are other ways the public is assaulted to make them softer and more susceptible to these kinds of media propaganda interventions?
Kirkpatrick: I would say one way that you get it. This will be a both sides-ism. It is the encouragement of people to look into this themselves. It is the same thing; I think when I see BioLogic advertised for an immune system disorder, You’re advertising to the end-user of a complex medication. At the same time, we’re telling people to do research on things that they probably have no way of validating, even the basic data that they’d need to do the research if they wanted to do the research. They wouldn’t have a way of doing that. By encouraging both sides to do that, what you’re doing is encouraging people to go out and Google things, and then, as Rick has said here, they will find this vast swathe of knowledge. They will cherrypick to confirm what they decided before they started the research.
Rosner: My buddy who is super Trumpy and anti-vaxx. He sends me papers and videos which are supposedly scientific. They don’t hold up to even a minute’s worth of scrutiny. They’re, on the surface, people who don’t know how to do science trying to do science. On Twitter, if I decide to mute somebody, I will look at their profile. There are a zillion MAGA people who are claiming to be scientists or engineers of one type or another. If they are, then it is super depressing. Because that means people doing science are super gullible. But I prefer to think that a lot of these people are BSing. I got into it with somebody who claims to design nuclear reactors and is working on a fusion reactor. That person turned out to be completely fake, using somebody else’s photos. I asked them one basic physics question.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: They shut up.
Kirkpatrick: I knew that was coming. That is the problem with that. I used to do the one with the Vaxx people. Somebody would come to me and be bitching about the vaxx and how it’s bad for you. I would look at them and say, “Can you tell me what Kreb’s Cycle is?” They’d say, “What?” I’d say, “The citric acid cycle, the Kreb’s Cycle?” If you do not know the basic cycle of human physiology, how are you going to discuss some in-depth subjects like the viability of vaccines? On the basis of what? I don’t understand; you want to discuss it. That’s the point. They don’t have the basis to do research.
Rosner: I’ve lost much of my ability to concentrate and read books. I used to read a ton of books. But now, the immediacy of information and the rate at which information and BS come flying into my feeds. I feel like that level of distractability happens in general.
Jacobsen: Do you think people become evangelists for a cause, any cause, in this kind of mediasphere, an ecosystem of information? For instance, you mentioned how Lance sends you these papers and videos, and any amount of scrutiny would fall very quickly. It reminds me of these tales, which are some form of fundamentalist religion sending letters and emails, scripture and so on, to family members to, hopefully, bring them into the fold. It reminds me of a similar kind of psychology or social phenomenon. Do you think there is an evangelist fit there, too?
Rosner: Yes. Anything that happens has to fit into the chosen information bubble. There are pundits on each side. However, the fabrication of conspiracies, I believe, is owned more by the right. Anything that happens needs to be spun in such a way that it fits into the overall narrative. That the anti-vaxxers are pro-Trump. There is a whole set of rightwing beliefs that are afraid of immigrants. In any development, some things can fit in without being spun. The Hur report on Biden is spinning itself. So, the right will absorb that uncritically and be happy about it. When Trump is found liable for sexual assault by a jury in his slander trial, that side has to fabricate a pattern of facts that allows people to continue to believe in Trump. “Trump is a rich guy. Rich guys are victimized by false accusations of rape. By the way, Biden showered naked with his daughter and raped her.” Obviously, not true.
Kirkpatrick: The other thing you have is this phenomenon is not just Trump. It is the right. First of all, I am going to amplify what Rick said. The problem that you have with the rightwing in the United States, the democratic world, the first world in general, the liberal society that has been built is working. To be honest with you, most people, even the poor, have a pretty nice life compared to people outside of the bubble of the developed world. But the one thing that you do have is technological innovation in society, and because of that, it causes a separation in ability between the people who are intelligent and the people who are generally not so intelligent. The Trump phenomenon has empowered the last group. So, people whose political opinions weren’t taken seriously 40 years ago are now. That is a danger. The reason is that it doesn’t matter what Trump says or does. They know he is still empowering them, if you understand what I mean. It won’t matter.
Rosner: You have tens of millions of people who are willingly gullible. Who will listen to Tucker Carlson or Hannity and buy what is being said uncritically? Scott, you are up in Canada. I feel like up in Canada. Things are less nuts up there.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: You may not have the full panic or uneasiness that we have down here because things are more nuts down here.
Kirkpatrick: A lot more nuts, a lot more.
Jacobsen: When it happens, they’re outliers. Any of the figures that tend to have an American styling to them in their means of disseminating bullshit. They’re typically marginalized, or if they become famous, they pretty often become infamous. So, it becomes an obvious mark that, even though famous, one should not necessarily trust what they say. If they have any professional qualifications or a deep passion for something, so they have something relevant to say about it, you can listen to them within that sphere. But outside of that, you don’t listen to them too often. I am not too glued to social media or anything like that to get away from it.
Kirkpatrick: Scott, I was sitting in a Kava bar a couple of days ago. A guy sitting beside us was one of our “I want to wear a gun everywhere I go,” and so on. We were discussing this. One of the things I said was, “Guy, we live right up the street from Fort Pierce. It is a pretty dangerous place. But you can go out on the street in London. You are not going to get killed, generally.” The first thing he did was tell me about the epidemic of knife attacks in the UK. Which, of course, has been in the news, especially in the rightwing news, “It is an epidemic for the UK.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing] I see what you’re saying.
Kirkpatrick: I pointed out to him. “Guy, with their epidemic, there are still 3.6 or so people per 100,000 killed with a knife in the UK. There’s 4.8 killed with a knife per 100,000 in the US.”
Jacobsen: Cornel West made a point a while ago. I don’t necessarily agree with his theological leanings and such. I like his passion – let’s say. He made a good social commentary comparison, or contrast rather, between the United States and Canada, particularly California. He noted that in terms of how Canadians kill each other in all ways is about the same as how Californians kill each other with stabbings.
Rosner: Yes.
Kirkpatrick: Right.
Jacobsen: So, it is a relative metric. So, when people talk about the most dangerous city in Canada, I used to work in a psychology lab that worked with the RCMP. It was an Indo-Canadian centre in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. I interviewed three times; when I first started interviews, Sgt. Baltej Dhillon was the first person in the RCMP to be able to wear a turban. He had to fight for that. It was controversial in the 90s. Not a big deal anymore. He won the case, naturally. In that particular city, you can say, “It is the most dangerous place in Canada.” You have to always contextualize. Yes, but in Canada, which is one of the safest places in the world, even at a high rate here, it is amongst the safest in the world. It is a relative ranking or comparative metric. I agree with the point.
Kirkpatrick: If you don’t count freezing to death.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s why most people live close to the border.
Rosner: Kirk, you said earlier that liberal centrist government, non-crazy government, has been working pretty well. I’d argue that I want a normal government, even if it is a little dysfunctional because I want the government to not be insane. Until tech can come along and make a lot of our wishes come true, that is obviously what is going to happen. Tech will bring some dystopian aspects that we’re already experiencing. It will bring a lot of the benefits that people associate with the Singularity, like vastly extended lifespans. Entertainment is already tons better than it was when I was a kid. The quality of life will improve vastly. Although, weirdly, if we can keep from going crazy for the next 15 years, one other thing. We were talking about forces of derangement, more or less. I have a nutty theory in addition to the derangement caused by propaganda and the Russian firehose model of disinformation. I wonder. Looking back on history, we had a flu epidemic started in 1918. That pandemic killed at least 50,000,000 people worldwide and messed up a lot of people’s brains. Within ten years of that pandemic, you have the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Within 20 years, you had World War 2. We know that Covid eats your brain. That a bad case of COVID, bad enough to hospitalize you, does the equivalent of 20 years of aging worth of damage to your brain. I’d say at least half of the people on Earth have had Covid by now. It is still out there in huge numbers. I am wondering if Covid is making us stupider and more subject to crazy behaviours and movements.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] It makes me wonder if Fox News eats your brain. [Laughing]
Rosner: It does. It is a common story. “My dad was a moderate Democrat. Until he started watching Fox News, now, he is not.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Kirkpatrick: You have a few of the old sticklers on both sides. You have old Republicans who shouldn’t be Republicans today because they’re not Trumpsters. My father, who has been dead for quite a while, was one of these old-time democrats. Big labour guy, in the end, when he was in his 80s, he was basically aligned with the Republicans. But he would have caught fire and burned before he pulled any levers for Republicans. No matter what, he was one of those. I do believe that Rick might have a point with the brain damage. I am not sure if that hadn’t happened before Covid; maybe it had accelerated. The funny part about the Spanish Flu. The pandemic he was talking about. It is believed to have started in the US.
Rosner: Yes.
Kirkpatrick: They were so quick to blame China. The Spanish Flu epidemic was believed to have started in Kansas.
Rosner: That was being censored. There were reports of the King of Spain getting the flu. So, that is where the “Spanish Flu” came. It is goofy that way.
Kirkpatrick: It was because it was World War I, and Spain was neutral. There was no new censorship in Spain. So, they reported their flu statistics. Where all of the other European countries were at war, they weren’t going to report this. They kept silent. That’s why they called it the “Spanish Flu,” remember 1917.
Jacobsen: I want to focus on 2 points of contact here too. There are two populations of prominent types of people who can probably fall into two categories. One would be cynical operators. The second would be useful idiots. Do you think those classes of prominent figures who are cynical operators who want to encourage these types of conspiracy theories and bad theories about reality – how the world works politically, socially, scientifically, and so on – and useful idiots who extend the reach of those cynical operators through giving them microphones are equally bad, or do you think they are differently bad in different ways?
Rosner: The leaders, the Alex Jones’s of the world. I think the term for them is “accelerationists.” The “let it all burn” folks who want to have things get heated as fast as possible because only after things come crashing down can you rebuild. Yes, those people are super bad. I am not a Christian. I do not believe in Jesus as a holy person. But I keep wishing Jesus would come back…
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: … and rapture all the a-holes of the Earth.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] It reminds me. There is a company out there. That will take contracts for taking care of your animals after the Rapture. So, if you know you are going to be gone, Fido will be here by himself, starving to death. They guarantee that they are 100% atheist. Nobody is going to heaven. After they are gone, you pay them now. Afterwards, they take care of Fido for you.
Rosner: That’s a really good business.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] I can think of a lot of other Rapture-based businesses. The problem is you’re taking advantage of some dimwits. Sadly, stupidity is dangerous. It is a problem. As Rick has said, I am not sure if it’s not going to get worse before it gets better. It gets better because it always does. But if you consider that the Nordic countries have achieved, probably the highest standard of living humans have ever achieved in history, they tend to be less authoritarian than even places like the US. It gives a model of what you should be working at. That is the last thing or one thing I wanted to say. You used the word “bad” when you were asking Rick about the ‘bad people.’ I would like to define “bad.” For me, a politician is bad when his motivation is not the betterment of society for everybody. I mean that in a malleable way. There can be people like Mitt Romney, for example, with whom I don’t agree on a lot of things. I do believe that he believes that he is honestly and earnestly working to better his society, to make life better for everybody. Even if I don’t agree with his methods of doing this, you have a lot of people in our government today who do not have that as their motivation. It may be self-aggrandizement in the case of Trump. It may be “I am on the back of a tiger that I can’t let go of,” in the case of Lindsey Graham. Those are the bad people. That is what bad means. You are not working towards the betterment of society as you should as a public figure.
Rosner: The job of being part of a national elected office has changed to where it attracts a lot of terrible people because of money and politics. You are not allowed to fundraise on the job. You can’t make calls from the Capitol.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: There is a separate building. You, a congressperson, have to spend 20/25 hours a week as part of your job cold-calling people and begging them to donate money.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: That job is so miserable among other unsavoury aspects of public office, which means a lot of rotten people have been running for office lately.
Kirkpatrick: When I first started, I spent three years on the Hill with lobbyists as the head of a telecommunications company. I would go in and see congressmen and senators about my issue. Of course, it is a big place for me, too. When I first went up there, I was going with Bob Dole’s ex-assistant chief of staff. Bob was our lobbyist. The first person we saw was Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska. I saw down with him. I started to tell him what my issue was. Two minutes into a 10-minute explanation. He said, “Kirk, I don’t have time for all of this right now. I am going to have cocktails tonight at this bar in DC. I will have a lot of time there. If you want to come, we can sit down and talk about it.” I said, “Oh wow, thank you very much, senator, thank you.” He sat up. He said, “Goodbye.” He left. We left. I turned to Dennis. I was excited. I said, “We will have cocktails with the senator tonight.” Dennis said, “You understand it is $5,000 dollars a person to get in the door.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Ah.
Kirkpatrick: He said, “If we go, it will be $10,000.”
Rosner: Oh.
Kirkpatrick: You can imagine. I had lots of experiences like that up on the Hill. Where everybody had an ear to listen and a hand to get some campaign donations. In fact, I saw everybody on the Hill: 500 or so people. Of the 500, only 2 of them one was direct enough to be rude. It was Senator J. Rockefeller of West Virginia. When we sat down with him, he basically said, “Listen, guys, I want to tell you something.” If you are not going to sit down to tell me something to help the people of West Virginia, you are wasting my time. I want to get out of my office.”
Jacobsen: Ha!
Kirkpatrick: How’s that?
Jacobsen: It’s good.
Kirkpatrick: ‘I don’t care what your problem is. If it is not something that I can help my people with…’ Also, we sat down with Nathan Deal of North Georgia. He essentially said the same thing. “Listen, I don’t want to sit here and listen to this if f it is not good for the people of North Georgia and what I represent.” Everybody wanted money.
Rosner: Bob Dole was a decent Republican politician. I remember him conducting his presidential campaign with restraint and dignity, like John McCain.
Kirkpatrick: In fact, to be honest with you, Scott, you are probably too young to remember. Rick, do you remember Barry Goldwater?
Rosner: I remember him being characterized as a dangerous extremist.
Kirkpatrick: He was a dangerous extremist. He was nicknamed “Mr. Conservative.” He is Reagan’s role model. He is considered to be or was considered to be the father of the American conservative movement. By the time he died, I believe in the 1990s. He said to the establishment Republicans, “Don’t associate my name with anything you do. You have damaged the party far more than the Democrats ever have. You are extremists.” He said to Bob Dole, “Can you imagine we are the liberal wing of the Republican party now?”
Rosner: It’s crazy.
Kirkpatrick: It is crazy. Bob Dole was a conservative from Kansas.
Rosner: Some of my favourite people on Twitter and in general are former Republicans who got disgusted with what is going on. They have the courage of their convictions. They’ve close observers. I like Joe Walsh, a former congressman.
Kirkpatrick: Yes.
Rosner: I like Rick Wilson. Probably, in the future, he will be a campaign strategist. He probably came up with some of the campaigns and tactics in the former years. Now, he is working to stop Trump from getting re-elected.
Kirkpatrick: Mittt Romney!
Rosner: If you gave me a choice now, “You can have Biden with a 50% chance of getting elected, or you can just go with Romney and get rid of the risk.” I would take Romney over the risk of having Trump.
Kirkpatrick: I am a solid Democrat. I might even take him over Biden, to be honest with you. The reason is Mitt Romney is a technocrat. This is a guy who gets things done. That’s what he does. He has very little ideology and is very much a technocrat.
Rosner: He came up with the precursor to Obamacare. He ran a Winter Olympics.
Kirkpatrick: And made money! They made money!
Rosner: Yes.
Kirkpatrick: Who else has done that?
Rosner: Nobody, we have an Olympics here in 4 years. We may not lose money because we have had two previous Olympics and a ton of sports arenas in Los Angeles. I am hoping it is not a boondoggle.
Kirkpatrick: I hope the weather straightens out. I will tell you. LA has gotten strange.
Rosner: I don’t know. Last week, we had the biggest rainstorm in two decades or something. Stuff is increasingly volatile everywhere.
Kirkpatrick: Oh yes, it is terrible. “Terrible” is not the word. I can give an example of what has happened here with global warming. I am from a place where we get 33 degrees Fahrenheit one night a year at 5 in the morning. We will have three nights, which will be in the upper 30s and six nights below the mid-40s. Winter is generally in the upper-50s as a low for the day.
Rosner: That is LA weather. We will see ice on the ground, maybe a few days a year.
Kirkpatrick: We don’t ever freeze.
Jacobsen: That’s the Canadian motto.
Kirkpatrick: My point is: Last year, we had one 30-degree day and four 40-degree days. This year, we’ve had 3 40-degree days and no 30-degree days at all. It is warming up. It is 78 degrees right now where I am. We didn’t have any 30-degree days at all. Only four or five 40-degree days. It is exceptionally warm. In LA in June, I messaged you to see if you were in town.
Rosner: I am bad at getting messages, but okay.
Kirkpatrick: I think you answered me after I left. It was cold as shit in June. My friend said, “We have June gloom, but this is ridiculous.”
Rosner: I think climate change will eventually result in LA being abandoned by the entertainment industry.
Kirkpatrick: Because of the weather?
Rosner: People in entertainment. We’re all babies. We don’t like to be uncomfortable. If we start having 25, 30, and 100-degree days a year, a bunch of 80- 90-degree days, water becomes an issue. I think you’ll see more and more industries moving North. Plus, with telecommuting, you don’t need to have capital. The entertainment industry moved from New York to LA over the course of the 20th century. I think over the course of this century. It will disperse to every place.
Kirkpatrick: That is probably a good way of putting it: Disperse to every place.
[Break, session 2 begins]
Jacobsen: Okay, so this is a follow-up session 2. In the last one, we were discussing the larger context of the American Disease or Superempowered. Kirk, you were noting that “Superempowered” is probably a better term than American Disease.
Rosner: I like “American Disease” more. “American Disease” reflects the current dysfunction better.
Jacobsen: What about Kirk’s point earlier that it’s spreading more and taking on an international flavour
Rosner: That is another point in favour of American Disease.
Jacobsen: Oh, because it is being exported, that’s a good point. Kirk, in your interview with me, you noted that was big country thinking. Can you delve into that?
Kirkpatrick: What I was saying is some of the propaganda that we live under, some of the things like “greatest country on Earth.” I mentioned to him what we are talking about. Many times, somebody would say, “This is the greatest country on Earth.” I say to them, “How many countries have you been to?” I would say, “I have never left the US.” I’d say, “How do you know it is the greatest country on Earth?” What we didn’t get into, you might speak to many Americans who might consider themselves rather well-travelled because they have been to Alaska and never left the US. This is a phenomenon that you will see in Russia and China: what I call the big country syndrome. If you walk up to someone in Sergiyev Posad in Russia, they expect that you’re going to speak Russian to them no matter what you look like. Same in China. Same here in the US, as you know. This is beyond the big country syndrome.
Rosner: You could make the argument, plausibly, that this is the greatest huge country on Earth.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s good. That’s very good.
Rosner: You’re up against China India, which have their own dysfunctions and Brazil. Depending on what your priorities are, the Heritage Foundation does an annual freedom index, which is basically how capitalist your country is: the US is 25th out of about 170 ranked countries. But it outranks any other mega-country.
Kirkpatrick: Right.
Rosner: The little countries, there are lots of great little countries like all the Baltics, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, the Nordic countries. With their populations of 2 to 7 million, they are nimble enough that they can do all sorts of cool stuff.
Kirkpatrick: Estonia is one of the most connected countries on Earth.
Rosner: Yes, you can become an e-citizen of Estonia without living there. You can be an electronic citizen somehow. We are a big old cruise ship that takes 3 miles to make a turn. Even more so now because we’ve got obstructionist governments, which is another problem with huge countries. The more people, the more assholes and the more homicidal assholes, so you are going to see more maniacs doing maniacal stuff.
Kirkpatrick: Yes, absolutely, and you could be more extreme in doing it because you’re doing it from a larger sample.
Rosner: Yes, my parents were Republicans. They were fine. They had a party every time Nixon was elected. Everyone was invited, even if they didn’t vote for Nixon. My dad was a small businessman. His whole day was spent hanging in and around his store, talking with people. If he had started crazy talking and conspiracy talking, his friends, customers, and poker buddies would have set him straight. I feel like there is a loss of person-to-person, face-to-face, in the flesh, interaction. It has been replaced by anonymous messaging. This does two things. It gives lunatics a network to be lunatics in. It closes out messages from beyond the network that say, “You’re frickin’ crazy.”
Kirkpatrick: Or say, “You are frickin’ crazy.” The other thing is there has been this acceptance of everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. About things that aren’t opinions, if you understand what I mean, it is not my opinion whether it is summertime or wintertime. You can communicate facts to people who simply take them as your opinion. Their opinion is different.
Rosner: Because there are all these structures where when my Trumpy buddy presents an article that tells me a so-called fact. What is the source? It is Epoch Times.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: Breitbart, the deal is: I was a fact checker on game shows. You need to come up with two legitimate sources that agree. That your fact is a fact. After getting some questions wrong, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? raised their standard to four sources. The deal is, on the right, My buddy Lance can come up with eight sources who all reinforce each other about what is a fact. They’re all BS. They are all part of that sphere.
Kirkpatrick: Yes. People either aren’t capable or don’t bother thinking past something they like; they read, and they like. A statistic that was floating around for a good, long while was gun lobby selling the idea that there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses in the US.
Rosner: Which sounds plausible.
Kirkpatrick: It could sound plausible, except were that the case, it would imply 2.5 million is 1% of the adult population of the United States.
Rosner: Right.
Kirkpatrick: If they are using it defensively, it implies they are using it against, at least, one other person. That is, 2% of the adult population of the United States is involved in gun usage instances every year. Suppose I am 50 years old and have been an adult for 50 years. Statistically, a good number of the adults I know should have been involved in one of these instances. Yet, nobody I know is. I come from the backwoods of North Georgia.
Rosner: You poke at the number. A) You can poke at the number for half a second, do the analysis you did, and say, “That doesn’t sound right. Maybe it is 2.5 million per year. Maybe it is 2.5 million since they started keeping statistics.” You look it up. You find it is, maybe, illegal even to keep these kinds of statistics.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: The CDC is legally prohibited from keeping some kinds of gun death statistics because the NRA didn’t like that.
Kirkpatrick: My whole point is that it was the first time I read that statistic. It immediately jumped out to me. This cannot be possible simply because the number involved implies a lot of people who you know should come home one day and say, “Holy shit! Some guy pulled a gun out on me.” It should be somewhat common for you to know this.
Rosner: Yes, except a lot of people aren’t good at math.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: I am kind of frustrated with the American math curriculum. You go to geometry, algebra, trigonometry, precalculus, and calculus. If you are trying to get into Ivey, you might get all the way up to differential equations. There is no class in probability and statistics.
Kirkpatrick: Even what the classes are teaching, what is the proficiency? What is the proficiency level?
Rosner: My kid is now an art historian. She wanted to go to a good college. She went through differential equations. When is she going to use differential equations?
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: She could use probability and statistics. Probability and statistics, you can apply to anything. You could do some statistical analysis if they found this many samplers from this era. How many more might be out there somewhere? People don’t have the habit of doing back-of-the-envelope statistical analysis. COVID is a hotbed of people coming to wrong scientific conclusions, and nothing comes to mind immediately but wrong mathematical conclusions.
Kirkpatrick: Wow, a lot of correlation doesn’t equal causation-type analysis.
Rosner: Like VAERS, are you aware of VAERS?
Kirkpatrick: No.
Rosner: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), somebody goes to a doctor and says, “I broke my arm. I have a headache. I am peeing blood. If this happened, within a month or two of them getting vaccinated, it is supposed to go into a database.” Based on the database, if you have a ton of people peeing blood, and if you compare it to the people who weren’t recently vaccinated, then you see if there is a higher occurrence, a statistically higher occurrence. If it turns out, people occasionally have blood in their urine. Then, no, it is not a freakout. You, maybe, don’t need to look further.
Kirkpatrick: Mine was a little more active than that. I got my COVID vaccine through the VA. The VAERS program would send me a text message every week and ask me. “Have you had any of these conditions?” Have you had anything happen this week?” And so on, then, we’ll talk to you next week.
Rosner: That is a good thing. Unless it is used by idiots.
Kirkpatrick: Of course.
Rosner: There is a group, a webpage, and documentaries called ‘Died Suddenly.’ It is based on a misunderstanding VAERS, in which x number of people died within a month of getting vaccinated. You do the Bayesian simple analysis. How many people, regular people based on a similar population, would have died suddenly? Or LeBron’s kid keeling over with a heart attack on the court at age 18. People say, “That never happened before.” No, if you look at sudden deaths among people under 30, dying on the basketball court is – dying under 30 is rare – not rare on the court among that population.
Kirkpatrick: It is not that rare. It has been happening forever. It is not something that is more, now.
Rosner: Taking people through the math. Try taking people through the math on Twitter; people aren’t going to hang around for that.
Kirkpatrick: What’s math?
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Right.
Kirkpatrick: I used to, when I Twittered, of the argument: If someone wanted to do math with me, and if I wrote out an equation like x+7=4, and their response was, “You can’t add letters and numbers.”
Rosner: Wow.
Kirkpatrick: That would end the conversation immediately for me. “Sure, sure, that’s enough.” You have the functional equivalent of this happening quite a bit on Twitter.
Rosner: Yes.
Kirkpatrick: It was funny. You talked about Estonia being so connected. The head of our Estonian broadcast unit was a native-born Estonian. He’d grown up in New Jersey. I came in one day. He said he’d been offered a position as ambassador to the United States for Estonia. I congratulated him. He said, “If I take it, I have to give up my American citizenship. Because I will serve another government and be an American at the same time.”
Rosner: I see.
Kirkpatrick: He accepted it. Five or six years later, he was the president. He served two 5-year terms as the president of Estonia. The reason that I find it a little amusing is that he was a big MacIntosh user. When he became President of Estonia, I wrote him and asked him if he was still using the Mac like he always did. He wrote back to me. I wrote to his presidential address. He said, “Look at the return address.” It was thelvis@mac.com.
Rosner: He turned the whole country, Mac.
Kirkpatrick: He was continuing. The Estonians were already knowing they needed to push hard into the internet. They became the most connected country on Earth. They are a little scared now, of course, especially given Trump. There is a substantial Russian-speaking minority in Estonia.
Rosner: What percent?
Kirkpatrick: I don’t know. However, they have been vocal about keeping Estonian as the language, drunken Finnish, as they sometimes say. Estonian and Finnish are virtually the same language. 22% Russian.
Rosner: That’s a lot. That’s disturbing because of the justification for trying to take away chunks of Ukraine.
Kirkpatrick: Exactly. They are concerned. He is not the biggest Trump fan. I am not speaking for him. I am telling you. You can imagine the Baltics, especially, but they are NATO members.
Rosner: I am sad that Russia’s leadership went so bad. I like mosaics. When people think of mosaics, they think of crappy mosaics, mostly because that is what most of them are in America. Historically, there have been some nice mosaics. I like those. Out of St. Petersburg, I bought a couple of excellent mosaics. I was thinking, “At some point, taking trips to Europe, it might be nice to go there and meet these people in person.” Now, I will not even communicate with them over email because that is a way to get flagged.
Kirkpatrick: It could be a way to get them flagged as well.
Rosner: Yes.
Kirkpatrick: That is the bigger problem. I was in Russia last in 2005. I had not been there for probably ten years. So, maybe, from 1994 to 2005, it totally transformed itself. It has become a modern metropolis. I was absolutely blown away by the transformation in Moscow. I can’t believe that they threw all this away. It boggles my imagination. This transformation was amazing.
Rosner: China, I read an article on China. It suggests China is throwing a lot of its modernity away. What is his name? The guy people say looks like Winnie the Pooh.
Kirkpatrick: Xi Jinping.
Rosner: He is an old-school dictator and makes bad economic decisions in order to have more control over the country’s dictator style.
Kirkpatrick: That is definitely happening. He is reining in a lot of people who had serious economic power. That is also happening. The amazing part is, in spite of all this, the things these guys are doing are absolutely amazing. China put in more solar power in the last two years than the US has done in history.
Rosner: Yes, that’s crazy. But also, I feel like – and you are better informed on all this than I am – China, for the most part, can just be patient and let having four times the population that we do…
Kirkpatrick: …What Xi Jinping has done is crazy. I think a lot of the Chinese know it. Hu Jintao, who came before him, was what you said: Patient watching the economic miracle happen, “Let’s not mess with it. Let’s keep things going the way they are, so no instability.” Xi Jinping has gotten into the cult of personality thing.
Rosner: It is a shame for China. But it gives us a bit more breathing room if we want to maintain dominance a little longer.
Kirkpatrick: Remain the hegemon? I am not sure the UK minds so bad that they lost it.
Rosner: I like going to the UK. If you grew up there, if you lived there, it is another country. It is grimy in London, but going there as a tourist is fun.
Kirkpatrick: Yes.
Rosner: All the former number one countries of the world: Spain, Italy. We’ll be a great country to visit and live in after we lose it.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] China is an absolutely wonderful place to visit. I will tell you that right now. It is still a wonderful place to visit. Nobody will mess with you unless you draw a crowd. You’re not going to be out on the street preaching. If you said, “No, Xi Jinping sucks.” People would ignore you. They would not shun you.
Rosner: My framework is that I have been married for 33 years. My time of going to a club and trying to hook up is over. Plus, I wasn’t good at it. I tend to look at countries. “Is this a country where the 25-year-old me would have liked going to a club and trying to meet a girl?
Kirkpatrick: Do you mean China?
Rosner: I mean any country. It is one of my criteria.
Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes.
Rosner: I am not going out doing that. I look at things in a twisted retrospect. Is it a fun night? It is a ridiculous way to look at countries.
Kirkpatrick: That is most of the countries in Southeast Asia. China has an unusual thing. It is different from most of Southeast Asia. They have these clubs. You go into them. They have girls who work in the club. They come and sit down next to you, talk to you, rub your back, smile at you, rub your leg. That is all they do. You tip them $20 or something like that. They’re not going home with you. They’re not going to the back room or anything like that. They are not even kissing you. They will rub your back, arm, or leg and giggle a little. Things like this.
Rosner: That is not the worst thing in the world. I don’t like strip clubs because it is a lot of money for things to happen to and around me. That won’t work.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Kirkpatrick: Whenever anyone compares to a strip club, if they’re in the mood for a strip club, it is saying, “Let’s go into the buffet place. We couldn’t eat anything, but we could look and smell. But you can’t eat.” That’s not my idea of fun.
Rosner: That brings up another thing of people who have lunatic beliefs in America and elsewhere. It is a lot less painful to be an incel now than it was when I was a kid. I desperately wanted a girlfriend. When you feel that way, a guy can go a couple of ways. One way is to be pissed at girls for not appreciating them. The other way is to look at yourself and say, “I have got to improve myself.”
Kirkpatrick: “I am a nerd.”
Rosner: Yes! I went to crazy lengths to make myself more attractive and to better myself. Now, there are a lot of incels. Incel is short for involuntary celibates. Guys who can’t get laid. There is a big voluntary component to it.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: A lot of guys decide not to care about it. They’ve got plenty of things to occupy them besides wanting a girlfriend. Plus, there is an endless cornucopia of porn.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] You mean schmuck. Right? What do you mean by “incel”? I’m sorry. I know. No, I know. I absolutely understand. Every time I hear it. It is so pitiful. It is their fault. What do you mean by “it is their fault?”
Rosner: A lot of people who hold lunatic beliefs. It has always been a problem, but it is worse now. The craziest voices are the loudest.
Kirkpatrick: Yes, exactly. The problem is we are used to recognizing crazy and simply not letting it interfere in the public sphere. The US was rather good about not allowing crazy. It popped up every once in a while. But most of the time, in the public sphere, we didn’t allow it.
Rosner: The John Birch Society, in the ’50s and ’60s, had to do its business via the mail. Having a conversation is like playing chess by mail. It would take weeks and months.
Jacobsen: Wasn’t there a figure like Dan Quayle that popped up at some point?
Kirkpatrick: Dan Quayle was George H.W. Bush’s Vice President. When they stuck a microphone in his face, this guy went blank like a deer in the headlights. One of his quotes was that they landed in Hawaii. Of course, women came. They threw a bunch of leis around his neck. This reporter stuck a microphone in his face and said, “Vice President Quayle, why do you think Hawaii has played such a pivotal role in the Pacific?” He said, “Hawaii is a group of islands. It is in the Pacific. And it’s here.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s good.
Kirkpatrick: When I worked for Radio Free Europe, the president of Radio Free Europe told me about a week before he was going to DC. He was bitching. They set him at a state dinner next to Dan Quayle. He was going to have to listen to this idiot the whole dinner. This guy was a Republican like him. It wasn’t like that he didn’t like him. “I am going to have to listen to this idiot. It is going to be terrible.” When we came back, he said, “The guy is nothing at all like what we see on the camera. When I was talking to him, he seemed like a normal, intelligent guy.”
Rosner: Dan Quayle was a bit of a hero in the January 6 insurrection.
Kirkpatrick: Oh, did he say something about it?
Rosner: Pence was like, “Can I throw out the vote? Can I accept these alternatives?” He went to Quayle. Quayle said, “Absolutely not; you have to follow the norms.”
Kirkpatrick: Of course.
Rosner: We have a long history of tarring and rejecting politicians based on one or two incidents.
Kirkpatrick: Quayle [Laughing] had lots of instances.
Rosner: The nail, the stake through his chest, might have been when he corrected a kid, like a 4th-grade kid. He visited a classroom.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] Yes.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Why would you do that?
Rosner: A kid spelled “tomato.” Quayle corrected him and put an “e” on the end of the tomato.
Kirkpatrick: [Laighing] Right.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Kirkpatrick: Dan Quayle was wrong. We can’t continually look forward to the front. We have to look past the back.
Rosner: It is happening right now with Biden being painted. The first year of Saturday Night Live was 40 years ago or more. Ford is president. He stumbled a little bit getting out of Air Force One. If you look, most presidents have had trouble coming up and down the stairs of that thing. It is steep. So, SNL did a skit every week where Chevy Chase, playing Gerald Ford, tripped and took down a Christmas tree.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] Because he tripped.
Rosner: Yes, Ford was a great athlete. He was a college football player. He was anything but clumsy.
Kirkpatrick: Do you know which position he played, which makes your point even better? He was a fullback.
Rosner: So, he had to be nimble.
Kirkpatrick: He, at least, wasn’t the stumblebum that they painted him to be. He had to run with the ball. He was a good athlete.
Rosner: Then what is his name? Dukakis rides in a tank. Somebody, some military person, said, “You can’t be in a tank without, for safety reasons, wearing a helmet.” Dukakis didn’t have the foresight to ask, “What will this look like?” They put on the helmet. He looked ridiculous. That, maybe, cost him several percentage points, at least, looking goofy.
Kirkpatrick: In fact, it shows you how skewed this perception is; that when that happened when it was Dukakis and Bush, and the Blue County did a whole series, ‘Do we pick shrimp or wimp?’ George H.W. (Bush) was the wimp in that. He was a fight pilot in the Navy! He got shot down! He was the least wimpy person you could possibly imagine. This was a guy who raced cigarette boats in his 80s. What are you talking about, “wimp”?
Rosner: Didn’t he skydive at 90 years old or something?
Kirkpatrick: It was bad enough. Gorbachev started saying, “Have you been with this idiot on a boat? He is insane.”
Rosner: [Laughing].
Kirkpatrick: He is doing 120 miles per hour across a lake in a cigarette boat with Gorbachev scaring the living shit out of him. He was a Navy aviator. He got shot down and bobbed in the ocean for hours until they picked him up. He is the wimp.
Rosner: Yes.
Kirkpatrick: What are you talking about, “wimp”? That kind of stuff.
Rosner: Which brings up the media, especially since we moved to 24-hour news; TV news is frickin’ profit driven and terrible. Fox News is terrible. In that, it is intentional propaganda. But CNN and MSNBC aren’t much better in what they cover and how they cover it.
Kirkpatrick: I don’t know how much you can alter the Overton Window in the media. The problem is there is so much that would turn people off. It would have to be a slow movement back towards the center.
Rosner: Yes, I would like real-time fact-checking.
Kirkpatrick: That is coming. That’s what I said. I think this Apple Vision Pro is where you’re going to start seeing. Of course, not in this, maybe 5 or 8 years down the line. You have a pair of glasses. Even in a conversation with somebody, someone says something, like your 2.5 million gun uses. Something in the glasses says, “Debunked,” or, “Wrong, incorrect.” Something like this. You don’t have to say it. You see it immediately. Oh, nope, that’s not right.
Rosner: That would be great if that happened.
Kirkpatrick: It is extreme. But the way I would point it out. Think about the Terminator movies showing his viewpoint, looking out his eyes.
Rosner: It has been ten years, 15 years, since Google Glass.
Kirkpatrick: Yes, Google Glass has been more what the glasses saw. Apple Vision Pro is more overlay than what you see. It becomes part of your reality if you understand what I mean.
Rosner: That is awesome.
Kirkpatrick: Imagine walking into your grocery store. Every buy one get one free has a big red circle around it. When you look down the aisle, “Ding, ding, ding,” it’s all in circles. That’s augmented reality.
Rosner: I am hoping. The future has all the awesome stuff.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] We say that. I am an old man now. I am not that old.
Rosner: Me too.
Kirkpatrick: When I think about the fact that I have voice recognition now, on a scale of 97/98% good, I don’t think I would get to this. My house is almost 100% voice-controlled. I didn’t think we’d get to this. I put Apple Vision Pro on. I said, “This is an iPhone moment.” In another ten years, these will be sunglasses. Everybody will have them.
Rosner: That’s good. I am waiting for the contact lenses.
Kirkpatrick: They’re coming too. They are coming. You can go further than that, the Neuralink.
Rosner: I am a little skeptical of Musk.
Kirkpatrick: I am a lot skeptical.
Rosner: But somebody is going to do it. Plus, we are going to need it because, even without COVID-related brain damage, the number of Alzheimer’s people in America is supposed to triple over the next 20 years or something like that. That might be a questionable statistic, which we should poke. The number is not going down.
Kirkpatrick: Do you know what may be the problem with that, Rick? It may be related to a little-known statistic that people don’t know about: The life expectancy of man has almost been continually increasing while his lifespan has not been. The point here is: 95 years old today is an old man. There were 95-year-olds in Rome. Today, there is more than there was in Rome’s time. So, aggregately, our life expectancy has been getting longer. My point here is that a lot of those people who would’ve died or gotten Alzheimer’s when they were 72 died in the gladiatorial pit of Rome. They didn’t make it there. It may be why Alzheimer’s is increasing. It could be because people are getting old.
Rosner: Sure, if you can, if not for them, if for the loved ones, if you can keep them around for another year or two when people get into their 80s and start falling down, that’s often the end, whether the fall kills them or that’s evidence of other problems. That longevity Aubrey de Grey. So, there is the Singularity guy, Kurzweil.
Kirkpatrick: Yes, I know him.
Rosner: There is another guy, the same. He looks at the biology of aging and says there are seven major issues of aging that need to be solved before we can have reasonable extensions of longevity: getting mitochondria to remain good. There are lunatics, tech lunatics, and billionaires who buy blood from teenagers and get transfused with teen blood because they think it will help their mitochondria.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: That doesn’t work very well. If you and I can hang around long enough for them to solve 4 of the major problems of aging, maybe we can get another 10 or 15 years of life that isn’t too miserable. Maybe, in those 10 to 15 years, they solve a couple more. Kurzweil says you don’t need to live forever. You need to live long enough for every year you live; they come up with a way to give you one more year.
Kirkpatrick: I always have this nightmare. It will come out announced. We finally solved the aging problem. We can’t make you younger, but we will make you freeze right where you’re at, and I’ll be 86.
Rosner: Yes, there is that. There will be a bunch. If you are 86, you might be able to end up looking like somebody who is in their 60s, but weird. I wish they could erase ten years off Biden.
Kirkpatrick: Another problem with that. It’s not the body alone. It is your mind. After a while, it gets boring, if you know what I mean. If you’re 103, you have basically seen everything, done everything – been there, done that, got the t-shirt, “No, thank you.” The best way I can tell you. How old is your kid?
Rosner: I got one. She is 28.
Kirkpatrick: I have 3. One is 30. One is 28. The other one is 25, so it’s about the same. When the 30-year-old was 18, he and 3 of his buddies, so 4 of them, got in a car and drove up to see one of the NBA quarter-finals in Atlanta from down here in Florida. It was a 600-mile road trip. They stayed in a hotel, the first hotel away from home, up in the basketball tournament. As they were leaving and all excited, I said, “Guys, I am jealous.” They laughed. I said, “But I want you to understand. I am not jealous because I want to go with you. Because I think it would be the worst experience in my life.”
Rosner: Yes.
Kirkpatrick: But to be back where you are and go there, I’d give almost anything. To go with you, “Oh hell no! Horrible. Ugh! No.” That is the point this far down the line. I know what is coming for these guys. While it might be exciting the first time, that’s the only time it is exciting. The next time, it is a pain in the butt. [Laughing]
Rosner: When growing up, my mom and my dad were 400 or so miles apart. For visitation, it was that trip. That is a miserable trip. Plus, Vegas is 300 miles from LA.
Kirkpatrick: Even that is a fairly miserable trip; in July, in LA, I drove to Vegas. That was the first time I had done that trip. It was 118 degrees. It was nice and warm there through the desert.
Rosner: There is nothing there.
Kirkpatrick: There is nothing there. There is a huge solar farm there, liquid sodium.
Rosner: That is, maybe, new. I saw some windmills on the way, but I did not see the solar farm.
Kirkpatrick: It was a big installation closer to Vegas. Anyway, Scott, we are not solving any of the world’s problems.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] What are some of your skepticisms about Elon Musk mentioned earlier, or Peter Thiel or Peter Diamandis or others? Figures like this, who have, at least, a public prominence or sufficient wealth and prominence in the business and technology sphere to have potential real impacts. At the same time, people assume they can take any of their opinions about any subject matter at the expert level.
Kirkpatrick: Especially when it is them, it can be dangerous when it is them. I think with Elon. You’ve seen it illustrated several times. His idea with the submarine was to save these kids in Thailand. It was whacko when you saw what they had to do to save the kids. It was a help in the slightest.
Rosner: Didn’t he disparage the rescuers?
Kirkpatrick: He called him a pedophile. He implied he was in Thailand for that reason.
Jacobsen: That’s awful.
Rosner: Musk has been revealed as intellectually lazy. He grew up loving science fiction. I read a bio of him. He loves tech. He is fascinated by tech. He probably has a zillion ideas every day, but he is a little too fond of his – overvalues his – spur-of-the-moment thought.
Kirkpatrick: He overvalues everything about what they do. Not just his thoughts. I do not mean to disparage Elon terribly, but I have a Tesla Model S. I have the one with the yolk in it. One of the things that they like to crow about is that they took the shifting or the things off the side of the stalks. So, your turn signal is a button on the yolk. The left and the right turn signals are on the left side of the yolk.
Rosner: That is confusing.
Kirkpatrick: Think about that for a second; both the left and the right turn signals are on the left side of the yolk. But there is a button on the right side of the yolk, exactly where the left side turn signal is; that is for voice activation. It is to activate voice commands. Now, what kind of human interface person do you have that let this slide through? It is not just Tesla. I had this Nissan LEAF electric car. It had a knob shifter. An electric car only has two gears. That is forwards and backwards. You can guess. In order to make the car go forward, you had to pull the shifter back. In order to make the car go backward, you had to push the shifter forward.
Rosner: That must be hundreds of little fender benders.
Kirkpatrick: For me, as the person in it, I always think, “Nobody in the pre-production of this car said, ‘Wait a minute guys, in order to make it go that way, you push it that way. In order to go this way, you push that way. Really?” Nobody said anything. They said, “Oh, yeah, okay, that’s good.” Both turn signals are on one side of the yolk.
Rosner: That is crazy.
Kirkpatrick: One on top of the other. It is easy to get it right, if you know what I mean. Not to mention, the horn is a button for your thumb; it is the fourth button over across the top of the yolk, the horn.
Rosner: When you need the horn, you need it fast.
Kirkpatrick: Exactly. It is not a problem. I love the car. It is an absolutely wonderful car. But with a little more humility, Elon once said, “Apple is the graveyard where Tesla employees go to die.”
Jacobsen: I remember that.
Kirkpatrick: What he should have been saying was, “We hope to poach some of their people over here to give some of the features Apple products have.” Instead, the pride, he may have sincerely believed what he was saying, but their human interface sucks. It sucks.
Rosner: I used to check IDs in a bar and run a line outside of bars. A lot of the time, it was a bell curve in terms of dickishness.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: Some people were extremely understanding and tolerant of the situation. Some weren’t. Some were insanely obnoxious about it. I would always be telling myself. “Is this worth getting upset about? This is just statistical variation around an average level of being a jerk or not being a jerk.”
Kirkpatrick: I like the term “dickishness.”
Rosner: When someone is around Trump or, in some ways, Musk, people have no defences, and society doesn’t have defences about hats because they’re statistically rare. Most people haven’t encountered people who are pure bullshitters and don’t have any defence. We still screw up in how we deal with Trump.
Kirkpatrick: Somebody said to Trump’s lawyer. “Your client is the equivalent of penis cancer.”
Rosner: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: What do you make of – not the ‘humility’ with regards to technology, design, manufacturing, and things of that nature but more with regards to his – purchase of Twitter, now X, orientations around free speech actions following from those statements, impacts on public culture? Things of this nature.
Kirkpatrick: Rick is the expert on this one.
Rosner: It remains to be seen. In that, it is very annoying. I used to love Twitter. Back in the days when Twitter was all “change one letter in a movie title to wreck a movie,” it was little games and stuff. I follow hundreds of comedians to read a ton of jokes. Now, most of the comedians have been driven off the site because it is not fun anymore. It is all political. But it remains to be seen, if ever, whether this will influence the election, which is mostly what I care about at this point.
Kirkpatrick: I think he has hit the nail on the head. I don’t even go on X anymore. I used to look at Rick’s posts all the time and sometimes interact with them.
Rosner: My posts aren’t any fun anymore. It is all “eat my chode, you MAGA butthole.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Holy shit, Rick [Laughing] So, there’s that.
Kirkpatrick: Classic American discourse.
Jacobsen: Correct. When it comes to Ray Kurzweil or people who would be considered Singularitarians, they have either a firm or a loose belief in some form of Singularity in the Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil focuses on health and nutrition. Aubrey de Grey focuses on his processes of aging rather than focusing on aging as one thing. That has been an increasing discussion. There has been some discussion around not simply evidence-based medicine but more around personalized medicine. If these technologies do come to fruition, if they become a scientific reality, they can be mastered and used on wider sets of aging populations around more of the developed world. Could we consider a lot of the human body at some extreme point in the future as something like a Ship of Theseus? I remember talking to or interviewing Evangelos Katsioulis. His opinion was that, in general, ‘there is no limit to the integration between machines and human biology.’
Rosner: I buy that entirely. It is all coming. It’ll be possible to replicate consciousness within 30 years. That is a little pessimistic. I believe I might be super wrong. The key to consciousness is the connectome. The pattern of dendritic connection. I don’t know how you get in there and map it. Can you do it with nanobots? Is that even feasible? There is a sitcom called Upload, I think, by the guy who The Office, which is pretty much a comedy version of that.
Kirkpatrick: If you have read any of Robert Heinlein’s books, he created a Heinlein universe. One of the recurring characters was a guy named Lazarus Long. Lazarus Long’s family has a mutation. They don’t age or age slowly. He lived for a long, long time. He has technology far beyond what the normal person has. One of the things is that there is a computer that runs his house, his car, and everything else. In the books, he will notice that the computer that runs the house has become sentient. He can’t use them to do that anymore because it would violate his morality. It is enslaving it because it is a sentient being. He would download it into a body. It would become a character in the book. “Oh, shit! I have to train another assistant to take over the house because this one is sentient and knows what it is doing, has a name, wants to be called Sandra,” or something like that. It is one of the things I have always said about AI. You might find out as the computer scientists come closer and closer to creating a sentient thinking machine, i.e., recreating a brain, that some of the things that come along with the human brain might be inherent in sentience itself. I mean things like emotions and things like this. It could be to the point where instead of the super thinker that takes over the world. AI in the computer says, “Nah, I ain’t going to do that. I don’t feel like it.”
Rosner: Yes, it’ll be like the Cambrian Explosion of different types of thinking and consciousness, but also the cheapening of consciousness.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] I have got this image. “I would like to return my computer. He developed a Nazi personality.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: AIs do become racist. My wife came up with one of the most common. She has never written science fiction before. She tried a science fiction story. She wrote the story of a mechanical nanny looking back lovingly on life raising a kid. A shocking end is one many have come up with the nanny turns out to be in a landfill.
Kirkpatrick: Oh wow.
Rosner: A lot of people have independently come up with that idea. I don’t think it is a risk for AIs alone. When you can create a human-level consciousness that costs five bucks, it is not great for anybody.
Kirkpatrick: If that will ever be possible.
Rosner: Not for a while.
Kirkpatrick: It might. You never know. I am extremely skeptical. Do you know about the AI beating the Go masters?
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Kirkpatrick: The lesson learned from that. Even though these Go Ais have become so proficient that no human player was in the same league, Once they got somebody who played outside the box, they lost.
Rosner: Okay.
Kirkpatrick: The reason they lost is because they realized that the AI, as good as it had become, still didn’t know what it was doing.
Rosner: Right.
Kirkpatrick: It didn’t know if it was winning a game or even playing a game. The object was to win. All it knew was it reacted to patterns that it had learned through playing these masters. The big deficit that the AI had was that it had no cognitive sense whatsoever. It was a counting machine, essentially, which could work quickly.
Rosner: It was a Bayesian engine doing the basics. There are a couple of steps between the Bayesian engine and consciousness. I think they are conceivable. One thing we know we have: Scott calls it “multimodal input.” We have input from all our senses to build a complete world plus our memory plus our biases and associations plus our emotions. It remains to be seen that if you invent the technology. Suppose you give multimodal input to AIs in something to real-time; that is enough to have something that resembles consciousness.
Kirkpatrick: I hope I live to see it. I am very skeptical. Not that it won’t happen, but that I will live that long.
Rosner: I don’t think it is that far away.
Kirkpatrick: What do you mean? I don’t even buy green bananas anymore. I am not that old. No, 20 years, I will be 83.
Rosner: Me too.
Kirkpatrick: 20 years ago, we didn’t have iPhones. That is a major change. But we did have the internet, even though it is older than 20 years. How much more change will we see in 20 years, Rick?
Rosner: I think we will become more intimately connected to increasingly powerful tech. Right now, we call it AI, but it is big data Bayesian engines.
Kirkpatrick: Yes.
Rosner: To some extent, the modules in our speech for humans is, if you weren’t constantly interrupting speech with other thoughts, a Bayesian engine itself. You’re looking through your suitcase full of next words in a Bayesian way. Unless you’re interrupted by further input. In 20 years, we will have appliances built onto us or into us in a gentle way, having a device with you, with little spider legs that ride your shoulder. I don’t know if that is practical, but it might be fashionable for a while.
Kirkpatrick: Yes, why not?
Rosner: We will have what you’re talking about, which is augmented reality through your eyes. Eventually, augmented reality will be able to go directly into – or maybe not augmented reality – your brain via some link, especially for 85-year-old billionaires whose brains are failing.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Rosner: Biocircuitry that helps take over some of their thinking. You will see this stuff move over to the courts in 30 years when someone wants to marry their AI, robot-sentient girlfriend. Or, when the billionaire’s brain is down to less than 8% of the neurons he was born with, he has to argue that he is still a person. We will screw it all up because it has been 2,000 years, and we haven’t figured out how to reasonably deal with abortion.
Kirkpatrick: Yes, but the problem is, it moves glacially. We move quickly. Unfortunately, I feel like I was born yesterday. Now, we are talking about the next 20 years. I have seen many miracles. I hope we see more. I think this augmented reality is one. It is going to come very quickly.
Rosner: That would be great. Kurzweil’s singularity date is in 2040, which is now 16 years away. I think he is optimistic. There is a lot of great stuff coming between now and 2040, as well as some terrible stuff.
Kirkpatrick: If you can imagine, I take it you’ve seen the Iron Man movies. If you can imagine how Tony Stark interacts with his computer, this Apple Vision Pro is the first step in this. You are using your hands to interact with the image in front of you. Although, right now, you can’t see it. If you had 3 or 4 people, you’d all see it. It would be as if you were interacting with your hands. If you can imagine, rather than having this meeting five years down the line, sitting at the table, we’re sitting at three different tables, but see each other and talk to each other as if we are there. If I hand you a paper, it appears on the table in front of you.
Rosner: That is one of the solutions for climate change when everybody can telecommute like that.
Kirkpatrick: What will happen? It will empty Canada.
Rosner: It will empty Canada?
Kirkpatrick: If you can live in Aruba.
Rosner: I think you should be living in Canada.
Jacobsen: It warms up.
Rosner: Canada becomes more livable.
Jacobsen: Could the Canadian Shield become more livable with climate change? It is a good question.
Rosner: Edmonton, you still might need to get to the mall via a tunnel in the Winter. Vancouver and environs will be nice.
Kirkpatrick: Toasty. It reminds me of seeing a little silhouette of two guys sitting over the ocean, on a cliff overlooking the ocean. One was saying, “The West Coast is really beautiful. With the earthquakes, I would like to be in Kansas.” Then the second one said, “This is Kansas.” It is the same thing. Soon, you might have property there, Scott.
Jacobsen: Yes. I mean, weren’t places like Egypt several thousand years ago lush ?
Kirkpatrick: Mesopotamia was lush. But it was lush for a different reason. It became unlush for a different reason. Both Egypt and Mesopotamia are on alluvial floodplains. So, civilization formed around those plains because people had to figure out how to trap the water, and then use it to fertilize crops and grow agriculture. The problem with that is that when you do that; and the water doesn’t wash out. It evaporates in the Sun over thousands and thousands of years. You’re constantly depositing, sodium, salt, stuff like this, into the sand. Over a while, it becomes less and less fertile. That is why the Fertile Crescent is no longer as fertile a crescent as it once was for 3,000 years, 4,000 years of civilization.
Rosner: Y’all, I’ve got to close out here.
Jacobsen: Last question, short thoughts on the Carlson-Putin interview to close out.
Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: You’re welcome.
Rosner: Putin said some bullshit to justify in some kind of historical frame based on bogus history that Ukraine should be his. I didn’t see the interview. That is what I gathered. So, Putin’s going to do that. Tucker Carlson is going to do what he does. The most distressing part of it to me is how many people in America are cheering for Putin and Tucker Carlson
Kirkpatrick: It wasn’t an interview. It was more. “Okay, I am going to ask some questions and allow you to put out whatever propaganda you want to put out.” It wasn’t an interview. It was, basically, a presentation and, as Rick said, the sad part; I don’t think it’s so much to help Putin as it is to opposed whatever the US is doing right now because it has to be bad because Biden is doing it.
Rosner: Yes.
Kirkpatrick: If it was Trump trying to defend Ukraine, Carlson wouldn’t even talk to Putin because is a “terrorist.” So, the stuff like this is not serious politics. It is pablum for the people who want to watch this kind of stuff. Anybody else is turned off by it. Let’s pray there is enough independents turned off by it, that crap like, “We won’t come to defend NATO countries,” scare them, because it is true.
Rosner: I agree.
Jacobsen: The end.
Rosner: The end. Thank you.
Jacobsen: Rick, thank you very much for your time, again.
Kirkpatrick: Thanks, Rick.
Rosner: Thank you.
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