Ask A Genius 1578: Boomer Immortality, Organ Tech, and Late-Life Desire

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/12/11

How will emerging longevity technologies let wealthy boomers bend death, desire, and inequality to their advantage?

In this interview, Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen explore how emerging longevity technologies may reshape wealth, desire, and death. Rosner argues that as organ engineering and anti-aging interventions move from billionaires to millionaires, affluent boomers will buy extra years of life and libido, exacerbating generational inequality. He imagines pig-grown and hybrid synthetic organs, emergency brain-saving pumps, and a booming longevity industry. The conversation then shifts to his personal history: disastrous parties, missed awards, and meeting his future wife Carole as a semi-famous, overworked bouncer who gamed 1980s bar culture while stretching every dollar and contact lens.

Rick Rosner: It used to be that you could not take anything with you because you died. When you are dead, you cannot have anything. Right now, boomers have a lot and Gen X has a little bit, but everybody else is fucked in terms of wealth and property and all that. There used to be a natural limit, but in the next couple of decades, that limit will be extended.

There will be new and expensive ways not to die and to make yourself appear less old. Boomers and some Gen Xers—right now, billionaire tech figures are doing extreme things to try to avoid aging and spending vast amounts of money. But they are billionaires. In the future, there will be expensive options that mere millionaires can buy to try to get themselves a few extra years.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: And there will be freak accidents despite that.

Rosner: If you are counting on accidents to kill boomers, accidents in high-income countries kill on the order of ten people per 100,000 per year, not one in a thousand, and many boomers have already died from all causes combined, including age-related disease, not just accidents.

The oldest boomers are about 79. The youngest are around 60–61 years old, given the usual definition of baby boomers as people born between 1946 and 1964. And I am saying that there will be a bunch of rich older adults who are scrambling and fighting as hard as they can to continue being alive, lively, and hooking up because boomers are a famously libidinal generation.

Look at Rupert Murdoch. He is not a boomer—he was born in 1931—he is 94. And he is still trying to get laid. He has been with partners decades younger than him. I am saying there will be some bad rich-old-person behaviour once it becomes possible to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on ways to keep living and to make yourself function better.

Case in point: organs grown in pigs, tweaked with CRISPR to make the organs less likely to be rejected. A patient recently lived for nearly 9 months with a gene-edited pig kidney functioning as a human kidney—the most extended recorded duration of a pig kidney transplant in a living human to date.

Nine months before it was rejected. Now he is back on dialysis, but that proves the concept. When this becomes commercially available, it might cost around $80,000. If you are a kidney patient and you can buy yourself a year for $80,000—and by then the CRISPR tweaks will probably be better—you might get two years out of one kidney. People will spend money on kidneys, on livers, eventually on hearts.

Jacobsen: One of the biggest industries in the future will be longevity. We have this idea of growing organs, but that is advanced for now. I think, in some way, nature—since evolution manages functioning systems—suggests that an engineered future approach will involve purely synthetic or synthetic–biological hybrid systems that are more efficient.

Rosner: Because kidneys take enormous punishment. They filter the waste that the liver does not, and probably more, since they handle liquids. They produce all your urine. If you can develop a more efficient biomechanical organ—part kidney cells, part synthetic framework—that can withstand punishment better, or that does not need to be grown in a pig. Yes, that will become the direction.

A pig kidney will cost in the high five figures to low six figures. People should know the statistics on this, but a vast number of people still die from sudden cardiac arrest. It is one of the leading causes of death worldwide.

Somebody needs to develop a little pump—either implanted in your neck or external—that can be activated if you are having a cardiac arrest. Well, not exactly that, because you do not want to die alone with no one around you. But a pump that, when your heart stops, keeps blood flowing.

When your heart stops, you get no oxygen and no blood to your brain. After about five minutes, you are done. Everything else in your body can survive longer, but your brain cannot. So you need a small pump that keeps enough blood going to your brain so you can get to the hospital.

If they do not get your heart restarted for, say, 15 minutes, it would still be okay because the pump would keep your brain oxygenated. I would have to talk to a doctor to know if anyone is developing it. But engineering something like that seems possible. That is a mechanical solution to a cause of death that kills a massive number of people each year.

Jacobsen: What is the fanciest event you have ever gone to?

Rosner: The fanciest event? The weirdest fancy event was when we went to the Vivid Video porn Christmas party one year.

Jacobsen: What is the background? Why did you go?

Rosner: Raph and I made a friend, Tony Lovett, who worked for a porn company. This was back in the 1990s. Their soundstage ran on a tight schedule. They had a three-day window at the soundstage. In three days, they could shoot two porn films, but they only had one script.

Tony said, “Can you guys write a 28-page script with all the action and dialogue between the scenes?” And we said, “Okay.” We cranked out a script.

They shot it, and then as a thank-you, they said, “Come to our Christmas party.” I do not think Raph went, but Carol and I did. It was nice. It was a hotel in the Valley. They had fancy food. I wish I had been better at networking, but it was fun to go to a porn-industry Christmas party. It was not people doing outrageous things—just people acting like people at a Christmas party: eating, drinking, talking, laughing.

Jacobsen: What is the most disappointing party you have ever gone to?

Rosner: In Albuquerque, when I was 18. I drove five, six, maybe eight miles—the last mile through mud—to get to a party, hoping I would meet a girl. That was the only reason I ever went out: to meet girls.

Instead of meeting a girl, a guy hit on me. Because I was delicious when I was 18—I was delightful man-meat. Then he said, “Oh, you probably hate me. You probably want to hit me.” He got apologetic.

I said, “No, no, no.” But it was all awkward. And I had driven way too far for that. This was back when I hardly had money for gas. I would run out of gas, then dig through the car for change. Back then, gas was maybe ninety cents a gallon.

And for a dime, I would buy enough gas to fill up a beer bottle. I would pour some into the gas tank. Then I would save about a half-inch in the beer bottle to pour directly onto the carburetor to get it to pop—to get the fuel to ignite—so the engine would turn over enough to use the 12 ounces of gas I bought, just enough to get me home, the four blocks to my house.

Anyway, that was a bad party for me.

Jacobsen: What else?

Rosner: One year, I was not allowed to go to my boss’s table at the Writers Guild Awards. We kept losing the Writers Guild Award for late-night writing, because some shows win it year after year—John Oliver, Jon Stewart in the glory years of The Daily Show.

We kept getting beaten, and we figured we were going to get beaten again, but I still wanted to go to the award show with the dinner and everything.

But nobody else from Kimmel wanted to go. They said, “Nah, you cannot go,” because they did not wish to one weirdo showing up and representing the show. So I did not go. And that was the year we won.

I would have had to get up and give the speech. They were probably right not to have me in attendance.

So nobody from the show was in attendance, and someone else accepted on our behalf. Otherwise, I would have given the speech, and that would have been weird. But I was disappointed. Instead, Carol and I went out and got spaghetti in Burbank.

Jacobsen: How were you on your first date with Carole?

Rosner: The principle of picking up women is that you need to demonstrate high value. And that is what a sidekick is for. He is your hype man—the guy who communicates to people in the club that you are a cool guy. I did not have a sidekick or a hype man, but on the night I met her, I had been in the newspaper for flying a physics equation over Boulder, which is ridiculous, but people do not know that shit is ridiculous.

So I went to a Jewish singles dance. I met Carole. Somebody came up to her and said, “That guy you’re talking with and dancing with—he is famous.” So I was vouched for by the external world.

Then we took third place in a dance contest, because I was… you know… an ’80s stripper. I was all buff. I was wearing—well, in the ’80s, it was acceptable to wear sleeveless shirts in semi-formal settings. I had a shirt I bought at Fashion Bar with yellow Chinese lettering on a black shirt.

At that point, I was benching 285, which was good for me. I was wearing tight pants. I want to say “parachute pants,” but even I wasn’t that ridiculous at that point.

Anyway, we danced, we talked. Then, a couple of days later, I took her out for sushi. She had never had sushi, so she thought that was sophisticated. Then we went to a movie. That would have been our second date. I put my hand on her thigh.

I put my hand on her thigh, and she moaned. And I thought, “Holy shit, this is the girl for me. She must be super horny.” She does not remember moaning, and now I do not think it meant anything sexual. Whatever it was, it was probably not because she was super horny. Maybe her knee hurt or something.

I was working four jobs and going to school because I was working constantly. So I would go over to Carol’s house, which was on 20th and Arapaho. Is it “Arapaho” or “Arapahoe”? Arapaho.

Jacobsen: Did you guys say that tribe differently up in Alaska or Canada, wherever you are?

Rosner: No, it is Arapaho.

Anyway, I would go over to her house and fall asleep on her couch because I was between school and work and getting four or five hours of sleep a night. I was exhausted.

One time, she came down to the Harvest House—Anthony’s Gardens at the Hilton Harvest House—where I was bouncing. She baked me a little chocolate cake. I was happy to receive it, but I could not give her the effusive thanks it deserved, because when I am checking IDs, I have laser focus.

I had a deep love of standing at the bar door and catching fake IDs. And she brought the cake to me on a Friday afternoon, probably after the Harvest House’s Friday Afternoon Club, where 2,000 people would come to the bar and order around 8,000 drinks. It was wild. This was a five-acre beer garden that once held the record for the most drinks served in a bar in a single day—50,000 drinks.

On football Saturdays, when the University of Colorado had a home game, the stadium would empty into the beer gardens, and 10,000 people would be there. It was so fun because everything was out of hand. Anything could happen as long as it involved people dry-humping, cocaine, or being drunk as hell. It was the high ’80s.

So she brought me a cake. I said, “Thank you,” set it aside, and went back to checking IDs—which was probably rude—but at the same time, shit, I was doing my best in trying to meet women.

This was before pickup artistry was a thing. I was doing it in the ’80s. Pickup artistry did not become a cultural phenomenon until the late ’90s or early 2000s. But I inadvertently did several things that worked in my favour. Even though I was bad with girls, I bounced bars. So, as I mentioned before about the wingman, if you go into a bar without a wingman, you have to be incredibly charming not to come off as a creep, especially in bars in the ’80s, where everyone assumed—correctly—that everyone was there to hook up. A lone guy was automatically suspicious.

A lone guy in a bar is a creep unless he is somehow incredibly charismatic. You need to be in a group. I rarely understood this concept when I went to bars. On my nights off, I would still go to bars, but it would never work for me. But as a bouncer—

I had a reason to be in the bar, so it cancelled the creepiness, because I was working. I was not there as a random creepy guy. That made me appear… well, less weird, and I would occasionally hook up. Maybe not being effusive about the cake was a neg.

The concept of “neg” didn’t exist yet when I met Carol in 1984, but it was a bit of a neg because I was too busy at work to be nice about the cake. Negs—anyway—can be effective. So it was an inadvertent neg.

Jacobsen: Any final thoughts?

Rosner: I have a contact lens in my right eye that is overdue for replacement. I wear contacts way too long. I try to get the maximum number of weeks of wear out of them, and in their last week, they make my eyes goopy. They are constantly slightly irritating. This contact is ready to go. It needs to be replaced. I hate replacing contacts. It feels like a waste.

But it is not, because insurance pays for my contacts. But I have this frugal habit left over. Here is a new topic: contact lenses cost $65 apiece when I was earning $4 or $5 an hour back in the ’80s. So if somebody punched me in the face in a bar, my primary concern was not getting hurt. My primary concern was that they would knock the contact lenses out of my eyes and I would have to replace them for a bunch of money. Which never happened—it is hard to hit someone hard enough that their contacts fly out.

But back in the days when I was trying to save money on contacts, little things would grow on them; they would get gross. I would take a razor blade and slice off some of the… well, not infection precisely. Tiny deposits get into the plastic, creating a small bump. You are not cutting off an infection—you are cutting off a raised spot caused by something embedded in the lens material. So I would cut off this little pimple on the contact that was maybe half a millimetre across and a quarter millimetre high.

Let’s wrap it up so you can go to sleep.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for your time today.

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