Rick Rosner On, 25: AI, Relationships, Education, Aging, and Modern American Life
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/08/16
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss AI-generated sexual imagery, declining intimacy, social media, changing attitudes between men and women, and weakening social pressures toward partnership and family formation. Rosner also examines AI-assisted education, declining male college participation, delayed maturity, and cultural representations of relationships. The conversation concludes with his reflections on aging, including declining physical strength, health anxieties, lowered expectations, technological change, cultural invisibility, and the benefits of taking life more slowly.
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Rick Rosner: I look at pictures of naked ladies online. Everybody does it. I look at a lot of AI-generated stuff, which is annoying for a lot of reasons. AI embodies the average preferences of its consumers.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In this case, it is mostly men.
Rosner: Men want big, round boobs that are bigger than the model’s head. It gives a uniformity to most images. The reason guys turn to porn is for variety anyway, so it defeats the purpose. What I find off-putting is how delighted the women are in the images to be having sex. This does not comport with the current landscape. It seems divorced from reality.
In reality, women do not like guys very much at this point in U.S. history. According to one study, only 25 percent of women aged 18 to 24 have positive views of men. It goes up a little for women older than 24, but women tend not to see the point of men. That is due to economic trends. A hundred years ago, women had to depend on men for support. Fifty or 80 years ago, men seemed more mature.
It also goes the other way. Men are somewhat disgusted with younger men and disgusted with younger women. Social media has a huge role to play in this. People on social media are constantly exposed to bigger, better deals that make them unsatisfied with the people around them. Besides that general thing, guys do not seem worth it. Guys can seem more like dicks than they used to, especially in the modern context, which does not push as hard for coupling, making families, and raising families.
This is also reflected in people having less sex. The disgust people have with people in the real world, as opposed to the shit they are seeing online, translates into younger people having one-third less sex than previous generations.
Jacobsen: Any other points?
Rosner: In first-semester physics, there are a lot of exercises involving finding all the forces on an object, such as a box on a slanted table attached to a pulley. There is the gravitational force, the resistance force of the table, and the force of the pulley pulling. A lot of the forces on people in America today, and the world, are pushing them away from hooking up.
I have a related point, which is that education is in a shambles right now because they let you go to school and not do any work. When I went to school, and I went to school a lot, I was huge on not doing work, especially essays. I failed to turn in essays a huge number of times. I just could not get my shit together to sit down and write the shit. I am nobody to talk, but I am going to talk anyway.
AI lets you avoid writing essays. You just hand it over to AI. There are earmarks of AI that your teacher can see. I guess there is a thing called the em dash, which AI uses a lot to connect thoughts. So does any decent writer. It is a great tool. But if your writing is em-dash-heavy, your teacher might suspect something. At this point, your teacher does not give a shit because if the teacher has 20 students in a class and 17 of those students are using AI to generate essays, the teacher does not have time to fuck around and police the AI.
This starts in middle school and goes all the way through college. People used to go to college to find life partners. My wife and I met not at college, but at a dance while we were both going to the University of Colorado 40 fucking years ago. Besides being a good place to find a partner, college was also supposed to grow you up.
Make you mature and educated. It is failing to do that, particularly for guys. In the U.S., undergraduate college enrollment is about three women to every two men. About 60 percent of undergraduates in America are women.
Guys are not getting educated. If people are going to college to get educated, they are not really getting educated because AI is helping them sidestep that. Part of the problem is the longer time it takes to reach mature behavior and the failure of our institutions to encourage maturity. Not to say that maturity is so fucking great. It is not like life in the period that MAGA claims to want to return to, the 1950s and 1960s, was ideal. There was a lot wrong with that.
But if you want guys who are not dickheads so they can enter partnerships, and if you are worried about the international baby shortage, those are a couple more force vectors not pointing as strongly in the direction you would want as they used to.
One more thing. There is a Judd Apatow movie with Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl called Knocked Up. That movie is probably 15 or 17 years old now. It is about, among other things, the journey of an immature guy becoming a responsible partner. It is a comedy. Seth Rogen starts off as this stoner video-game developer who has a one-night stand and accidentally gets her pregnant. The movie follows his journey toward becoming a guy who might be a passable partner.
To a lesser extent, it follows the journey of the woman as she becomes less snotty and more accepting, and maybe adjusts her expectations enough to allow a relationship to happen.
We probably need a movie or two now to explore that kind of process under modern conditions. You got an inkling of what was going on 17 years ago in this movie, which is reasonably insightful. It is almost a generation later now, and the pressure to keep being a dickhead is stronger. It would be instructive to revisit that.
Jacobsen: I had another question before we get into news, politics, and culture about the United States. Pluses and minuses, in some families, there is a tradition of having dinner and talking about the highs and lows, or pluses and minuses, of the day. It can provide some discovery about what people think that might not otherwise become clear. In terms of aging, now being past the regular retirement age in the United States, at least, and past the average age of death in some countries, what are the pluses and minuses, the highs and lows?
Rosner: The minus is the constant apprehension that the shoes are about to drop in terms of health. That is a huge minus all the fucking time.
Weakness is another. I have been getting back into free-weight bench pressing because, for decades, I would just use bench machines. Now I am actually using free weights. The amount of muscle I have has probably dropped by more than 40 percent because, at my strongest, I was about 175, and now I am about 140. Obviously, you cannot be as strong. It is discouraging to be, at best, 55 or 60 percent as strong as I used to be.
I also have a hard time putting on any bulk. It is probably a bad idea to put on bulk at age 66 anyway. So I do not like that whole thing.
A plus is lowered expectations. Carole no longer expects me to deliver in terms of getting a job. I still push myself somewhat. I still want to finish my book and stuff, and she would like me to do that. But when I take two naps in a day, she does not give me shit about it. In fact, that is reasonable. I should not be getting shit for naps because they are healthful.
Taking it easy on myself is not an unreasonable thing to do. So it is both a plus and a minus to have lowered expectations.
Falling away from the world is a minus. I do not know as much about technology or what is happening in the world. I am not especially bad at keeping up with tech. Most people suffer from the same problem because technology is moving so fast. Nobody knows what the fuck to think about AI. It is hard to have an educated point of view. Even the experts disagree wildly.
I have not been up to date on music this century. Another minus is that I do not present as a normal member of the population anymore. I go about my business the same way, but I have pretty white hair now. When somebody is presented as old, that person is usually 10 years or more younger than me. So I am older than old.
I do not see myself in movies and on TV. Movies and TV shows focus on people in high school or college, and then there are grown-up movies and shows that focus on people in their thirties and forties, with some people in their fifties and sixties thrown in as plot points. But we really do not feature much in the culture. So there you go. There is some stuff.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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