Ask A Genius 1563: Celebrity Encounters, Intelligence vs. Impact, and Trump’s Tariffs
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/06
Who’s the most famous person Rick Rosner has ever talked to—and what does industrious genius really mean?
In this exchange between Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner, the former Jimmy Kimmel Live! writer recounts his surreal brushes with celebrity—from Oprah’s fleeting touch to Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, and Sharon Stone encounters. Yet the dialogue turns reflective, exploring how luck, focus, and hard work separate the merely intelligent from the impactful. The conversation ends with Rosner’s sharp analysis of Trump’s tariffs, showing his blend of humor, intellect, and socio-political awareness.
Keywords: celebrity encounters, creative industriousness, horror analysis, political commentary, intellectual reflection
Most Famous Encounters
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever talked to?
Rick Rosner: I didn’t talk to her, but Oprah touched me once.
Jacobsen: OK, where is this going?
Rosner: When you get nominated for an Emmy, they used to read out the entire writing staff, and for late-night shows; that’s a large staff. Each show would try to come up with a new, crazy way to introduce the writers. We all walked out there, and Oprah yelled our names and put her hand on my shoulder or something.
I didn’t meet her, but I stood next to her for a second.
Jacobsen: Who else have you met?
Rosner: Kimmel is among the most famous people in America, especially after this latest Trump bullshit.
Meryl Streep walked past me on the show. I didn’t say anything; she didn’t notice me, but I was in her vicinity. I was also near Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
Kevin Spacey lightly flirted with my writing partner and me. But it wasn’t really flirting; he was just being friendly in a fun way.
I got to stand next to the director David Lynch—and a cow. I made eye contact with Tom Cruise on the red carpet, where I went out with Jimmy’s Uncle Frank, and Uncle Frank would ask inane questions. That was part of an early Kimmelbit—sending Uncle Frank out to talk to celebrities on the red carpet.
Uncle Frank was not a seasoned interviewer, so they sent him to talk to Tom Cruise. If I remember right—this was about twenty years ago—Uncle Frank didn’t ask Tom Cruise anything. He just started talking about himself, maybe telling Cruise about his experience watching his movies or something. Tom Cruise looked at me like, “What the fuck is this?” Not in an unfriendly way, just puzzled.
So there you go—Tom Cruise. Probably didn’t meet him. But Tom Hanks—I met him and worked on a bit with him, though I wasn’t allowed to work unsupervised because my superiors at Kimmel thought I was too much of a weirdo. They assigned my writing partner and one of the head writers, Gary. We worked on a bit with Tom Hanks, who was perfectly nice.
I’ve gotten to semi-meet a few people, but I’ve never had a heart-to-heart with any of them except Kimmel.
Elvis Costello—I got to work on a bit with him, too.
I once asked Sharon Stone if she’d like to talk. She was standing, and I asked if she wanted to have a moment to speak with, I believe, Uncle Frank. She said no.
Then there was James Gandolfini. Uncle Frank reached out and put his hand on Gandolfini, and Gandolfini got very mad at him.
Intelligence and Efectiveness
Jacobsen: The difference between an intelligent person who is effective and does substantive things with their life—things that have a nice symmetry between their own benefit and the public good—and the person who is intelligent but ineffective in terms of providing anything substantive to the world is significant. They go for media attention, but they don’t really do anything. What is the separation here?
Rosner: Industriousness is obviously key. If you work hard and you’re talented, that increases your chances of doing something meaningful in the world. You also have to be lucky, or at least not unlucky.
Darwin, who changed the whole landscape of everything, had the good fortune to go on a five-year voyage aboard The Beagle—that’s my standard example. Newton had the good luck to be sent home from Cambridge when it was shut down because of the plague. He had a year at home to think and came up with the theory of universal gravitation. I think that was also when he developed calculus.
He also had the good fortune to live to a very ripe old age for his time—into his late eighties—which allowed him to burnish his reputation. He ran the Royal Mint for a while and was good at it.
Einstein talked about Sitzfleisch—the ability to sit down and focus for long periods of time. He worked standing up while employed at the Swiss Patent Office, spending hours, days, and years thinking through difficult problems in physics.
Other people are more distractible. I’ve been highly distractible lately, and maybe for long stretches of my life. But I’m still hopeful that I have something to contribute. These talks—these eleven years of talks—they’re not nothing. There are some ideas in there that we’ve worked out that are… good-ish.
In a way, there’s some concentration and will there. You’ve provided quite a bit of it. Even though I’m distractible, I’ve thought about a lot of this for decades—decade after decade.
Fake Scary and Real Scary Movies
Jacobsen: What makes a scary movie legitimately scary versus just fake scary?
Rosner: OK, I would say that a horror movie is made truly effective if there’s some actual loss. Like in A Nightmare on Elm Street—a bunch of teens get slaughtered, and you feel bad for them, but you’re there for the slaughter. In a really effective horror movie, you feel authentically sad that the bad things have happened.
You get to know the characters and like them. They’re not just a bunch of assholes—you really are cheering for them to escape their horrible destiny, and they don’t make it. At least some of them don’t.
It’s also more effective if they get really close to escaping. There’s a movie I haven’t seen called The Descent. It’s about a group of women who go spelunking and encounter a murderous race of subterranean albino cannibals—or something like that.
I’ve only seen one still image from near the end of the movie. In the shot, a woman has finally found a passage to the surface. She’s hauling herself out—her top half is in the daylight, out of the hole—but from the image, you can infer that the creatures have gotten her lower half. It’s a really creepy picture because you immediately understand what’s happening.
I didn’t even see the movie, but I’d say that sense of true loss—coming so close to escaping one’s fate—is what makes a horror film really work.
Trump and the Solicitor General
Jacobsen: What happened with Trump and the Solicitor General?
Rosner: Trump sent his Solicitor General to the Supreme Court to defend his tariffs. According to reports, the justices were skeptical of his claims.
Under the Constitution, certain powers are given to the president, and certain powers are given to Congress. Trump is arguing that he has emergency powers to impose these tariffs because unfair trade with the rest of the world supposedly constitutes an economic emergency. I don’t think the justices are buying that.
We’ll find out in a couple of months when they issue a ruling. Sometimes it takes a while after oral arguments. If they rule against his power to impose tariffs, it may actually save him from himself—and possibly save the House for him in the midterms—because the tariffs are catastrophic for the country. They raise prices.
Tariffs push the country toward a recession. They increase unemployment, and the country would be better off without them. So, ironically, Trump would be better off—if he hopes to hold onto the House in 2026—if his tariffs were declared illegal. Now we wait.
We know that two of the justices are generally in his corner—Alito and Thomas—but even they were asking skeptical questions.
The government shutdown has become the longest in U.S. history. You’d think, “Well, all right, government shutdowns have only been a problem since about 1980,” when a couple of court rulings changed how shutdowns are understood, making them far more disruptive to the country’s financing.
We have 13,000 air traffic controllers who’ve already missed a paycheck. They interviewed one guy who’s working a second job at night doing food delivery. He said he won’t deliver past 8:30 p.m. because he doesn’t want to be tired when he’s moving planes around the sky during the day. That’s some not-great shit.
The government will cut 10% of flights at 40 U.S. airports to take some of the pressure off the understaffed air traffic system.
The courts ruled that the government has to continue providing food assistance—SNAP benefits—to roughly 42 million people. Yesterday, the courts reaffirmed that even with the government shut down, they must provide at least 50% of those food benefits.But Trump is saying he won’t, even though the courts ruled that he has to. His approval has fallen at the steepest rate of his second term, reaching the lowest point of that term in the past week or so. He’s down to about 42.1% on the aggregator—Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight—and another poll, I think CNN’s, has him at 37%. That’s still way too high for a guy governing like a complete dick.
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