We’re All Old at Some Point
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/13
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 getting older, and more!
Rick Rosner: I have a question for you. I read some tweets from you, especially the one from Aaron Elizabeth.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is this your new friend? [Ed. Sarcasm.]
Rosner: She’s my new friend. Generally, what happens in a situation where we have something that was initially angry becomes somewhat civil, especially with somebody who enjoys expanding their social media footprint and their public exposure by any means necessary. I sometimes invite that person on to my show. Now, this person, Aaron Elizabeth, has been labelled one of the 12 biggest distributors of COVID and vaccine misinformation, one of the dirty dozen, by people obviously who are on my side, who are pro-vaccine and anti-Covid. So, if I asked her onto the show, there’s a good chance she’d say yes, and then she and Lance could team up against me. I’d get very frustrated and get all yell-y, and they’d get yell-y, and it’s kind of what the show is, which is a shit show. But I don’t know that I want to platform somebody who’s such a prominent and skilled purveyor of disinformation. What do you think?
Jacobsen: I think you do your homework, prepare well, invite her, and set rules beforehand- rules of engagement. Then have Lance know, her know, and JD be the enforcer of those rules. Keep them to the rules of JD, which can set the bounds, sort of like a referee pulling everyone out of the ring when those rules are broken. So, there are three, so he can keep them in mind and three so everyone knows and can keep them in mind themselves.
Rosner: All right, that’s a good idea. Have you learned that in your model United Nations work – three is the right number? It seems like a guideline that you’ve employed productively.
Jacobsen: I employed this in group discussions with the high IQ community. I invented it and a couple of other principles, sort of ballparking it to adapt conversation. So, three; that number is just a hat-trick; three is a common number. It’s like a dozen; people will remember it easily. Also, it keeps it straightforward and simple. Model United Nations, you only have one person speaking at a time, and you have to be called when you raise your placard to be allowed to speak at certain times, and then you have to specify what the request is. For instance, there’s a very special rule even when an individual insults the dignity of another country, something that the person can then have a right to reply to.
Rosner: That’s getting way too complicated; we can’t do that.
Jacobsen: No, I’m just adding this for fun, just so you kind of know how this plays out. One time I saw this was at Harvard Model United Nations. Years ago, I think this was the third largest Model United Nations in the world, and our university paid for all of us to go. It was a fantastic 5-day event for Israel and Palestine. Palestine is an observer member State, and Israel is a member state of the United Nations, so one of them was insulted, and they just planned this out, these delegates, so that they could go to lunch early, apparently. So, one gave a speech, but they didn’t get a reply to their speech, and they both stormed out and they went and had lunch early. That’s one of the only times in my entire Model United Nations career where I’ve ever seen that used, and they used it well, for out-of-personal purposes. You don’t need sophisticated rules to set boundaries in a “shit show.”
Rosner: One of the things we’ve done is we now have time limits, which are working very well and stopping us from going around circles. All right, so here’s my request. I may invite her, but I don’t know. That might make me a horrible person, but I don’t know. My request is that you and Carole will likely outlive me. Carole has for the past few months been working on a book about my parents’ failed relationship because, as I’ve told you, she found hundreds of love letters between them. She wants to write the story of how this big, super passionate love went bad within five years.
Jacobsen: Interesting.
Rosner: Her product which I’m reading as she does it, I think, is highly publishable, though who knows given the state of modern publishing, but I think it’s good, and if it goes, I’m thinking that at some point, she may want to write about the offspring of this doomed relationship which of course is freaking me and what it was like to be with me for 40 freaking years and more. You and I have generated just a ton of material, and if at some point she chooses to do that project, I’m requesting that you help her wade through what we’ve done together.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Alright, well, thank you in advance.
Jacobsen: That’s going to be interesting. So, she has started on this project?
Rosner: I mean, it’s more than a start because she has the letters, which are themselves 80,000 words, and now, she’s done another 15,000 filling in the gaps. Most of the letters were from their courtship when my dad was flying around in a B-36 and when they were separated. Once they get married, the number of letters decreases severely because they’re living together and she has to write about it. Eventually, the letters stop altogether, and she moves on to other documents like a restraining order and a report from a psychiatrist about what might be wrong with the parties based on a counselling session and the divorce decree. Then, there will be a few more letters about child support, and a private eyes report. The nature of the documents changes. She’s still got a lot of work to do because she has to bridge roughly three years between the happy documents and then the sad documents and the documents from the letters from 1954 through 1956-57 bridge to the sad docs that started in’ 59-’60.
Jacobsen: Is this a request from Carole as well?
Rosner: No, but I will present it to her. She takes writing classes, and she has written about a lot of the people in her life. I think she wrote one short little thing, like in a writing class, they give you 45 minutes to develop an idea, and I think one of her things was about some freaking thing I did, and I just think that given the length of time, we’ve been together since 1986.
Jacobsen: That’s amazing. It’s longer than I’ve been around.
Rosner: Yeah, it’s crazy how fucking old we are. If this book goes which is filling in building lives from documents written for other purposes, maybe she’d want to try it again, and the documents for other purposes are what you and I have talked about, along with maybe a salting of like hideous tweets and also like her personal experience of me like how fucking weird I am, the shit I say to her is just ridiculous now, not abusive but just nonsensical like when I leave I’ll say “Have fun in your butt,” which means nothing because you can’t be in your own butt.
Jacobsen: Why do you say these things? [Laughing]
Rosner: And “Watch out for farts.” Again, it’s like something a weird six-year-old would say.
Jacobsen: It’s almost like people get too comfortable after a few years of marriage. That’s my observation, and then it just continues, and then you just have to start saying new things.
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