Ask A Genius 1502: Ending the Debate Show Over Misinformation

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/31

Rick Rosner recounts a demoralizing episode of his long-running debate show, feeling double-teamed by Lance and JD and hurt by their combative, bad-faith tactics. He argues Lance parrots conservative podcasts and refuses to concede Republican wrongdoing, citing transgender veterans’ benefits as an example, while JD amplifies conflict. After nine years with minimal audience impact, Rosner questions continuing, fearing the show normalizes misinformation and drains time, money, and energy. He critiques the sloppy plotting of the TV series Red Eye, then pivots to hostile market for documentaries, proposing a meta-documentary about pitching projects that reconstructs meetings from notes when recordings unusable.

Rick Rosner: So, next time I meet with JD and Lance, I have to ask them why I should not shut down the show. You listened to and watched the whole thing last night—and Lance mostly talks bullshit. He spends hours every week listening to conservative podcasts that teach him how to justify or dodge anything shitty that Trump and the Republicans have done. I try to be reasonable, and if Lance ever made a decent point, I would acknowledge it. However, he never does. Last night, JD jumped in multiple times to support Lance and yell at me. He was not justified any of those times. What do you think? Honestly, I feel like I am facilitating nonsense.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did you feel attacked?

Rosner: The show is about confrontation, but last night in particular, the bullshit poured down. Yesterday, I got double-teamed.

Jacobsen: Double-teamed—okay, they tag-teamed against you.

Rosner: I do not know if other things were going on, but that was rough. Sometimes, JD thinks Lance has a legitimate point, but other times, he enjoys getting me pissed off and yelling. Sure, the show is about people yelling at each other, but it should not be about letting lies win.

So, how do I feel now? I got bummed out enough about the show that we quit doing it for almost a year. However, I am the one who decides whether we continue. If it is going to be like last night, then there is no point. It costs me time, money, and frustration—and not that many people even watch it. I am not sure it changes anyone’s mind. It might even push people toward the bullshit side.

Jacobsen: What was the original purpose of it, the show?

Rosner: I thought it would be funny and entertaining to have a political argument while one of us was naked. We decided against me being fully nude, but I thought it would be easy and cheap to produce, which it is. If people did not like the politics, perhaps they would at least appreciate the art. However, after nine years, we are still unknown and unpopular. It probably just raises my stress and cortisol levels unnecessarily. Lance will not acknowledge Republican wrongdoing. The closest he came was when I mentioned that the Department of Defence is denying medical benefits and pensions to transgender military personnel—benefits they earned—just to be cruel. Lance kept throwing out objections, maybe that it was about recovering healthcare costs, which is absurd.

Jacobsen: So, how did it feel being double-teamed?

Rosner: I am used to it—it happens not infrequently—but last night was the most extreme. Reflecting on it afterwards, I became quite annoyed.

Jacobsen: Were your feelings hurt?

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: Do you ever talk to them about how your feelings are hurt?

Rosner: I am going to, but I want it on camera. You do not waste a moment like that off-camera. So next week, I will say I thought it was bullshit, and I do not see any point in continuing the show.

Jacobsen: Are you sure about that? Or on the fence?

Rosner: I am not sure yet.

Jacobsen: Or are you leaning one way or the other now?

Rosner: I do not know. The more I think about it—well, I still have a week until we do it again. However, what is the point? We have not gained thousands of viewers. It does not puncture conservative arguments either. If you already believe what Lance believes, nothing I say will change your mind. If you are undecided, Lance’s forceful arguments—even though they are mostly bullshit and cherry-picked—might actually convince you. So why do it? Would you keep doing it if you were me?

Jacobsen: That is not a fair question. On the one hand, I am not you. On the other hand, I spend my interest and time differently, and my temperament is not the same as yours. That is clear. If I had the opportunity, I would tune in and join occasionally. Still, I am unsure if that would make much of a difference.

Rosner: Exactly. I intend the show to be entertaining, but it will not be. It is definitely not good. We have been doing it for nine years, and I do not see it becoming any better or more entertaining suddenly. So, we will see. Rotten Tomatoes.

Jacobsen: What else can we talk about?

Rosner: I am watching a bad British TV series.

Jacobsen: What is it called?

Rosner: Red Eye.

There is a good movie called Red Eye with Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams. It came out in 2005, so about twenty years ago now. That is a decent movie.

However, this TV series with the same name is turning out not to be worth the time. You cannot copyright titles—there can be dozens of shows, books, and movies all with the same title. Anyway, this one is about a bunch of murders taking place on a plane flying from London to Beijing, a ten-and-a-half-hour flight. Four people and a dog have been killed so far, and they are only about five or six hours into the flight. They will not turn around. They will not land. Their excuse now is that they are over Russian airspace.

However, there is much nonsense. The job of making a decent TV show is cutting out the bullshit. Things that are merely convenient for the plot cannot happen just because they are convenient. If what happens is going to be stupid, then that part of the plot should be discarded, and the writers should find a different way to get where they are going.

Now, if you have invested much time and there is one stupid thing that happens in six hours of a series, that can be excused. However, if stupid things keep happening, then you are watching a product made by either incompetent people, those who did not care, or those working without sufficient quality control.

About a month ago, I met with a friend of mine who also works on documentaries. It is tough to sell anything now, including documentaries. The major streaming companies have realized they no longer need to spend as much as they used to.

In addition to pitching their documentaries, I want to persuade them—though I probably will not succeed—to do a documentary about trying to sell a documentary under the current circumstances. It is challenging to sell content under normal circumstances, let alone in these unprecedented times.

Often, the development people you pitch to are lazy, uninterested, or too focused on something they personally want to see made. The best development people are working for the most prominent companies with the most money. So if you are pitching to smaller networks or streamers, you might be pitching to some asshole.

It would be fun to make a documentary about these pitches. Sure, you would burn some bridges, but maybe fuck it—those bridges are not that good anyway. It would be fun if you could get people to permit you to record the pitch and their reactions to it. Though I do not think a development executive would ever agree to that. So, you would have to go in, make the pitch, and then secretly record it. However, you could not use the recording in the documentary—only to help you remember what happened. Then you narrate what happened in the pitch. That would be part of the documentary.

Jacobsen: What about Trump and defaulting claims there?

Rosner: It is not full repayment. That is defaulting. It turns out that Trump has defaulted on at least nine bonds and loans since 1990. At least three times in the 1990s, four times in the 2000s, and then again in the 2010s. So, he had been defaulting on loans and was deemed a high-risk borrower for about twenty-five years before he ever ran for president. Those guys were full of it. I cannot put up with that anymore—it is bad for me physically. Fills me with stress hormones. It is bad for the points I am trying to make, because they shout me down with bullshit.

And the last bank that would loan him money in the 2010s was Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank has paid approximately $14.5 billion USD in fines for money laundering, much of which is tied to Russian oligarchs. They kept financing Trump because they were effectively bankrolled by Russian money, oligarchs, and probably the Russian government to some extent. When laundering money, you do not care about taking a haircut on repayment risk, because the whole point is to move rubles into dollars.

There is a scheme I learned about called “mirror trades.” Essentially, a Russian oligarch purchases a substantial number of shares in Moscow using rubles. At the same time, Deutsche Bank facilitates the sale of those same shares in London or New York for dollars. The oligarch owns the shares for zero seconds, but they have converted rubles into dollars. Totally illegal. Deutsche Bank was fined billions for doing that from 2011 to 2018.

So, yes, JD and Lance were right about one thing: banks will no longer loan to Trump. But it is not because “Democrats are mean.” It is because Trump has defaulted on roughly half a billion dollars’ worth of loans and bonds. And a bond is a loan.

Jacobsen: Was there anything you said in that session—or in any of those sessions—that you would want to correct?

Rosner: Yes. I said that the OMB—the Office of Management and Budget—calculated that the poorest 40% of U.S. households would lose money on the “big beautiful bill” because of service cuts. That was wrong. It was not OMB. It was a team of economists at Yale who calculated that. However, they were supported by other independent economists. So the point was not wrong, just the attribution.

And I try to be reasonable. For example, when they were yelling about all the “peace treaties” Trump signed—when we looked it up, yes, he had signed a few. Not nearly as many as Lance claimed, and not at a level that merits a Nobel Peace Prize, but yes, he did manage to secure the signing of some treaties. I said so. Then JD goes, “Oh, you wanted all those people to die?” —what the hell?

That was what JD was yelling about. That is not the point. If I had not been getting yelled at, I would have said, Of course, I do not want people to die. You are just throwing this peripheral thing at me, as if I do not believe Trump signed all these peace treaties, then I must want a bunch of people dead. That makes no sense.

I also acknowledged that if Lance is correct, that Pete Hegseth, whom he always hyping, is—well, I think he is a piece of shit as a person—but if Lance is right that Hegseth’s policies or demeanour have led to more people signing up for the military, then that is a good thing. Lance claimed it has improved morale and esprit de corps, and I said, ‘Fine, I will give him that.’ However, you could argue that esprit de corps based on dumb bro-ishness may not be the best thing for a modern military. But I did acknowledge the point.

Meanwhile, Lance never acknowledges anything. He never admits the other guy has a point. The closest I got was pressing him on military veterans’ pensions being cut off because they are trans. At first, he threw out every excuse for why it was not bullshit. But eventually he muttered, “Well, maybe—you would have to look into it.” That is as close as he ever comes.

And that cannot go on. I do not win. Every week, after one of these shows, I leave feeling exhausted and like I have let down our side. My side is the side that is less bullshit. Lance treats listening to conservative podcasts like a full-time job—fifty hours a week, while he is painting or doing whatever else. If you call him, you will hear Hannity in the background. Most people know Hannity from television, but he hosts a three-hour daily radio show, producing this content continuously.

It is mostly not accurate, but it builds a consistent worldview. They all echo each other’s talking points, hammer the same themes, so it feels airtight. I cannot counter that. Nor should I waste my time trying.

So, I will probably shut down that format and try something new. Something me-centric. For example, I will pose for Lance—totally naked. I looked up the rules: you can be nude on YouTube if it is for artistic purposes. You have to be careful that it is not presented sexually. So I will stand there naked, talk about physics, Lance will draw me or paint me, and I will start reading from my novel. Lance or JD can ask questions—about the physics, about the book—or give me shit.

It is good. They will be beta readers. Do you know what a beta reader is? It is somebody you give a copy of your—well, why it is called beta, I do not know, it probably should be alpha—but you give somebody some sample pages, and they give you notes back. So yes, that is what I am considering doing with the fucking show.

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