Ask A Genius 1559: Humanity, Cynicism, and Technological Optimism
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/01
What do Rick Rosner’s favorite quotes, thinkers, and inherited philosophies reveal about his view of humanity’s future?
Rick Rosner joins Scott Douglas Jacobsen to explore wisdom both cynical and comedic—from Occam’s Razor to soup jokes. He discusses his admiration for writers like Neal Stephenson, Margaret Atwood, and Carl Hiaasen, who illuminate near-future chaos with humor and insight. Reflecting on inherited worldviews from his eccentric father and pragmatic stepfather, Rosner shares a guarded optimism: despite human folly and climate peril, technology and demographic shifts may stabilize the planet. Through his trademark mix of intellect and irreverence, Rosner dissects the human condition with both compassion and wit.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are your favourite quotes on life and humanity?
Rick Rosner: One of my favourites is, “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.” Another, from either Upton Sinclair or Sinclair Lewis, goes something like, “It’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it.” You see this with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who’s entirely under Trump’s thumb. When asked about the latest terrible thing Trump or the Republicans have done, he says, “I’m not aware of that.” It’s a variation on that same idea—it’s hard to get someone to be aware of something when they’re paid not to be aware of it. I like cynical quotes. I like Stephen Hawking’s line that people who brag about their IQs are losers. I like Occam’s Razor—that the simplest explanation is often the right one. There’s also an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: “It’s the mark of a great mind to be able to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.” There are plenty of others I like that only pop into my head when appropriate. One of my favourite dumb jokes: an old lady asks her husband, “Do you want super sex?” He thinks for a second and says, “I’ll take the soup.” I also like, “A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender asks, ‘Why the long face?’” There you go—there’s a bunch of stuff.
Jacobsen: Who are your favourite non-physicist thinkers?
Rosner: You might as well change that question to “Who are my favourite writers?” Neal Stephenson, for sure—all the writers who convincingly depict the near future. Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson, the guy who wrote The Clockwork Girl, Margaret Atwood, sometimes, the guy who wrote The Wedding Album—David something—Cory Doctorow, Dave Barry. I also like a lot of the Florida crime novelists—the ones who portray Florida as pure mayhem, with a bunch of lunatics running around. They made a movie out of one of those books—Bad Monkey. That’s by Carl Hiaasen. He tends to write the same book over and over: Bad Monkey, Strip Tease, and others. I used to like Scott Spencer, the author of Endless Love. William Gibson, too—he coined the term “cyberpunk.” I’m leaving out plenty of people, but I like writers who help us understand the near future in a digestible way. Neal Stephenson’s books are long, but they move fast. Sometimes he writes about things that aren’t near-future, and that frustrates me because I wish he’d stick to the stuff I like. He wrote a trilogy over a thousand pages long set in the seventeenth century, presenting that era as if it were science fiction—because the pace of technological change was so dramatic compared to what came before that it must have felt like science fiction. At least that one had Isaac Newton as one of the main bad guys, since Newton was, by all accounts, kind of a jerk. Still, I didn’t enjoy reading a thousand pages from Neal Stephenson that weren’t about the 2050s or 2080s.
Jacobsen: What is a piece of optimism that’s been pitched to you? How about this? A piece of optimism that’s turned out to be true or pessimism that’s turned out to be false.
Rosner: I haven’t gone through life pitching worldviews left and right, but I’d say my biggest takeaways are more like inherited attitudes. As I may have mentioned, my wife and I ended up with a box of my mom’s things after she passed away. My wife went through it and found a box of letters between my parents, spanning late 1954 through the end of their marriage. It began with love letters and then devolved into reports from a private investigator, notes from a psychiatrist, and court documents from their 1960 divorce. My wife didn’t meet my parents until the 1980s, when they’d been divorced for years and disliked each other. She transcribed all the letters and turned them into a novel that explored how they fell out of love. One thing we realized—though we should have known already—was that my dad was almost certainly on the autism spectrum. He had terrible life skills, the very worst kind of bachelor habits. I moved in with him one summer after his second divorce in 1980, and I’m not sure he even knew how to change a light bulb.
Out of twenty fixtures, maybe four bulbs worked. He had one fork in the entire kitchen, and either one pot or one pan—my brother had given him one, just in case he ever decided to cook, which he didn’t. So, one pot, one utensil, minimal lighting, but he was a pretty happy, jovial guy—though with bad OCD. He wasn’t unpleasant to hang out with, unless you were married to him, in which case his deficiencies became hard to ignore. He never talked to me about his worldview or gave me any fundamental philosophy. However, I think I inherited a lot from him genetically—some spectrum tendencies and a generally cheerful outlook.
If I had to sum it up, I’d say: even when things are going really badly, I know I can always masturbate and fall asleep. That’s oddly comforting. From my stepdad, though I didn’t inherit any genetic traits, I picked up a few life lessons. He was a friendly man who seemed to know everyone in Boulder. When we moved there in the early 1960s, the town had about fifteen thousand people. By the time I left, it was around eighty thousand, and he still seemed to know everyone. He was a small businessman, generous and charitable, but also very quick to judge people—and often labelled them fools and assholes. And honestly, I agree. People are fools and assholes. I wish I’d asked him more about what he thought, though.
“What percent of people do you think are fools or assholes?”
I don’t know what he would’ve said. He probably would’ve said that’s a question a fool or an asshole would ask. But between my stepdad and Mad Magazine, I learned that people are fallible. I believe most people, under little pressure, are good. As pressure increases, they fail—but at different thresholds. So there you go.
You asked what pessimistic worldview was passed on to me that turned out not to be true. Honestly, given the events of the past eight or nine years, it’s hard for a pessimistic worldview not to turn out true. I don’t have many that didn’t. Except maybe this: people who think climate change will be absolutely catastrophic—I 100 percent believe we’re in an era of human-caused climate change. I’m not a denier in any way, and I think we’re already seeing the signs: planes hitting severe turbulence and dropping a thousand feet in seconds—that’s increased upper-air turbulence caused by rising temperatures. In the future, people might avoid flying in the summer because of it. Hurricanes are stronger, and the weather is wilder.
Maybe half a billion or more people will be displaced, we’ll lose species, and the oceans will suffer. But I have guarded optimism because I think we’ll come up with technological “vaccinations,” if you will—imperfect but cumulative solutions, like the COVID vaccine, which wasn’t perfect but still saved lives. With polio or measles, the vaccine prevents infection entirely. With flu or COVID, it just lessens the blow. I think our response to climate change will be like that: dozens of partial solutions that, together, mitigate a lot of the damage, though not all of it. If the oceans acidify, maybe that’s the end of sushi—I don’t know.
But I don’t think behavioural fixes like recycling will save us. Technology will do most of the heavy lifting. And something else will help: we’ve got a global baby shortage. Generation Z is retreating from the physical world. They’re not having as much sex, not drinking as much, not doing as many drugs—they’re living inside their devices. You can make a joke about “pulling out,” but in this case, they really are. They’re disengaging from the world’s pleasures and vices.
Jacobsen: That non-drinking part has been criticized, but it’s actually healthy and responsible.
Rosner: Yeah, it is. I’m not judging it. I’m saying they’re less engaged with both the good and bad parts of life. Fewer babies mean we’ll probably peak in global population around the 2050s, which also means less pollution from human activity.
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