Ask A Genius 1518: Democrats’ Drift, Consciousness Math, and Alien Mayhem
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/22
Can a stumbling party, a pliable mind, and a hungry facehugger share one throughline of consequence?
In this installment, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner shelve podcast drama for life-drawing gigs and aging bodies, then pivot to politics: Democrats slump, while Gavin Newsom test-drives sharper mockery as Donald Trumptouts fantastical tariff “revenue.” Rosner argues passivity doomed 2024 and urges relentless counter-messaging ahead of 2026. A philosophical detour frames consciousness as modelable even with messy, inaccurate beliefs. Alien: Earth accelerates: Morrow blackmails Slightly, Arthur risks everything, then a facehugger dooms him; Wendy’s rapport with a juvenile xenomorph raises the stakes as Timothy Olyphant’s synthetic corrals swarms. Multiple species stir, two episodes remain, and survival looks unlikely.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Any progress on the Lance versus Rick with JD and Mark?
Rick Rosner: No, I have not been thinking about it, which has been nice. I have other things going on. I am applying to resume modelling for art classes. Because I am older, that’s a niche they like. In life drawing, they bring in older people so students can draw the realities of aging.
Carole asked me to send in a full-body photo. I discovered details I had not noticed before. My nipples used to be level, but now one is about a quarter inch lower. I knew my belly button was slightly off-center, but seeing it on camera rather than in the mirror was unsettling. It is not hugely different, but different enough to make me sigh. Rotten tomatoes.
Jacobsen: What about the Democrats? How are they doing?
Rosner: Nobody likes the Democrats. Their approval is at historic lows. But we are still a year away from the next election. There is time for opinion to shift, especially given what Republicans have done.
Trump or his team tweeted that the U.S. has made $8 trillion from tariffs. The real figure for 2025 so far is $158.8 billion—less than two percent of $8 trillion. Tariffs are a consumption tax. Importers pay the government, but they pass those costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices for cars, groceries, and other goods.
Inflation was 2.7 percent one month, 2.9 percent the next, and will likely cross three percent soon. Courts may save the U.S. from worse outcomes. An appeals court has ruled that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. If that ruling stands, it may prevent severe economic damage. Ironically, that could reduce the backlash against Republicans in 2026.
The Democrats are slowly adjusting, led by Gavin Newsom, who is aggressively mocking Trump’s style. That kind of aggression is what Democrats need but have not shown. They leaned back in 2024. Obama’s slogan was “hope.” Harris’s was “joy.” Instead of aggressively calling Trump a destructive figure, Democrats promised reasonable governance and sound policies. Voters were supposed to choose sanity over revenge. That strategy failed.
Now they need to be more aggressive. They have leaned back through 2025 because no elections are happening this year, and they do not control any branch of government. They reason that making noise is pointless. That is flawed reasoning. They should be laying the foundation now by openly calling Trump out. Social media is full of people doing this, but leadership must do it too—through ridicule, direct attacks, and aggressive campaigning—to prepare for next year’s elections. Republicans have been avoiding town halls because they get yelled at. Democrats need to channel that energy into their strategy.
Jacobsen: Calling Republicans out for being as destructive as they are—will that work? I do not know. But leaning back will not work. Any thoughts on thought?
Rosner: Another thing related to what we were discussing: the structure of consciousness—whatever that structure is—is flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of information processors, from poor to highly efficient. They all map; you can model them.
Your information processor doesn’t need perfect accuracy to be mathematically characterizable. In other words, you could model the consciousness of a person whose beliefs are mostly inaccurate or inconsistent.
At some point, someone’s thinking can become so chaotic that it no longer resembles what we’d call consciousness—they’re echoes. If someone has severe dementia or is in a dreamless coma—or is brain-dead—they may not be conscious in that sense. You can also imagine cases where people seem conscious, but their brain is producing once-conscious behaviours, and now they are just random things not tied to a more profound meaning.
That might be too extreme. People with dementia often mask how their memory and processing are failing. Rotten tomatoes. Anything else?
Jacobsen: No, we’re going to wrap up quickly. Also, I preempt you each week now. I can only do that for a little bit after this. I watch a review by a certifiable nerd—in presentation, in aesthetic, in voice. Then I let you give me your clippings, your descriptions, and between the two, I have the whole picture. So, where are you now in the Alien: Earth series?
Rosner: Right now, I’m covering the end of episode six and the beginning of episode seven, since we missed last night.
In episode six, some chaos unfolds. Did we talk about the flies that ate one guy’s head?
Jacobsen: Yes, that was in the previous segment.
Rosner: Okay. Slightly—one of the kids—is being blackmailed by Morrow.
Arthur, one of the lab scientists, is married to the British woman on the crew. He gets fired for standing up to the boss—Boy Kavalier.
Jacobsen: I didn’t even watch it, just caught the names from the summaries.
Rosner: Yes, Boy Kavalier. Anyway, Arthur is leaving when Wendy’s human brother comes in and asks whether it’s safe to be there. Arthur, knowing they’re on camera, says everything’s fine. But he secretly types a warning on a screen the cameras can’t see: Get the fuck out of here. He even disables the trackers on the synthetic kids to help their escape.
That makes Arthur the purest good guy in the first six episodes. Which, of course, means he’s doomed.
Toward the end of the episode, Slightly—still under Morrow’s threat that his family will be killed—sets up a human to be attacked by a facehugger. Arthur goes to check on the man whom the flies ate, since his vitals aren’t registering. The flies had devoured his head. Arthur walks into the lab area, and somehow—whether Slightly opened an egg or just got careless—the facehugger is loose. It’s fast. It latches onto Arthur’s face. Slightly then hides him in an air duct.
Episode seven begins with Kirsch—the synthetic played by Timothy Olyphant—back on duty, helping the security and maintenance crew round up the flies. They move the sheep that had been used to ambush Tootles, the man killed by the swarm. Meanwhile, Slightly drags Arthur, still facehugged, into his dorm. He convinces his friend Smee to haul Arthur out to the beach, where Morrow can recover him.
Wendy walks in and demands to know what’s going on. She says she has to tell the other kids that one of them is dead. The others try to stop her from leaving. But then she chirps to the xenomorph—the one born just three days ago, already six feet long, about three-quarters grown. The alien slams its skull against the glass of its containment chamber, and everyone knows those creatures can break through almost anything.
Faced with that, the others let Wendy go, since she now has some strange rapport with the xenomorph.
And that’s where I stopped watching.
These last chunks were satisfying—lots of pieces in motion now. Three or four of the five alien species are active. There’s the flower creature, there’s the dripping watermelon one. They aren’t fully involved yet, but they will be. We’ve got less than two episodes left.
How would you fight off a facehugger? They’re swift. If you cut them, they bleed acid, which kills you just as effectively as the creature itself. You’d need a specialized weapon—something like a raking laser that cuts multiple paths at once, followed by a neutralizing base to counter the acid, and then a plastic sealant to contain the spill—basically, a combination of a laser and a fire extinguisher.
Ideally, you’d wear a helmet with a defensive laser system that intercepts a facehugger mid-leap. A strong enough mask might work, too, but canonically, they can punch through thick glass or plexiglass. Looking around my house, I don’t think there’s anything that would give me a chance. Maybe duct-taping metal over my mouth and nose—but I’d suffocate before the alien gave up. They’re almost impossible to fight.
Fantastic episode.
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