Ask A Genius 1574: Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Supreme, Brain Aging, AI Consciousness, and the Psychology of Serial Killers

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/27

How do film, neuroscience, AI, and criminal psychology reshape our understanding of consciousness and cruelty?

In this wide-ranging conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosnermove from film analysis to neuroscience, AI consciousness, and the developmental pathways of serial killers. Rosner discusses Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet, before examining research on the brain’s five cognitive “ages” and growing expert unease about dismissing AI consciousness outright. The discussion turns to how declining neural integration affects human awareness and how this contrasts with the “as-if” consciousness exhibited by large language models. The pair then explore common patterns among serial killers, including escalating fantasy, early behavioral problems, impunity, and heterogeneous backgrounds.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What did you see with Carole?

Rick Rosner: We saw Marty Supreme starring Timothée Chalamet, produced and directed by Josh Safdie, who co-wrote it with Ronald Bronstein and is one-half of the brothers who wrote and directed Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler in 2019. It has a very similar vibe—very stressful, like being lightly electrocuted for 2.5 hours. It is about a sociopathic ping-pong player in the 1950s.

Jacobsen: On paper, that is a fantastic movie pitch.

Rosner: I have not read in detail how it is based on a real guy, but, loosely, it is inspired by table tennis hustler Marty Reisman, who wrote about the things he got up to in his autobiography. The main character definitely gets up to a lot. It is not a typical sports movie.

Jacobsen: Why table tennis?

Rosner: Because it is based on a real guy who played ping-pong in the 1950s.

Jacobsen: Why do you think he was drawn to ping-pong at all?

Rosner: Why do I think the main character was drawn to it? Because he was good at it, and because he was living in Brooklyn in the 1950s, where many other aspects of his life probably sucked. The film does not go into how he took up ping-pong. We meet him after he is already excellent. He is also a ping-pong hustler—like a pool hustler, but with ping-pong—finding places where people play. Ping-pong was pretty popular in the 1950s in New York, and you could find places to play and bet money on it.

There you go. The movie does not come out until Christmas, December 25, 2025. We saw a screening. I assume it will get some nominations. We have seen three movies that will probably get nominated for Oscars: this one, Train Dreams, the adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella about logger and railroad worker Robert Grainier, and Hamnet, which follows Shakespeare and his wife Agnes and how the death of their son Hamnet feeds into the creation of Hamlet. People are going to get nominated from all of those films.

Anyway, I sent you two science articles.  One article was a science-for-the-layperson piece explaining that researchers have identified five distinct “ages” of the brain. You have infancy and childhood, then roughly ages 9 to 32, when the brain consolidates and becomes more integrated. Then there are three later stages, with the final one beginning around eighty-three, when the brain’s network structure starts to come apart. The nodes—the areas that handle specialized analysis—become less connected to one another.

The other article discussed how experts who once scoffed at the idea that AI might be developing something resembling consciousness are now scoffing less, given what large language models can do. The two articles play off one another. If you accept the idea of the five ages of the brain, then people in their eighties—and even earlier—are becoming less conscious in a literal neurological sense. Their brains are becoming less integrated. The central clearinghouse or “workspace” of cognition is degrading.

Yet we do not doubt their consciousness. Most people only start questioning whether someone is conscious when either A) they are comatose, or B) their Alzheimer’s is advanced enough that they are nearly nonfunctional. But if the degradation of the brain’s central workspace has been happening for years—maybe more than a decade—then that key element of consciousness is also degrading. Perhaps it is one of the central elements. But we treat people in that state, and they treat themselves, as if they are as conscious as ever.

When we say someone is “losing their shit,” we usually mean they are losing competence to handle the tasks of daily life. We do not generally mean they are becoming less conscious. Maybe we should tell them that. I do not know.

If we can observe people whose brains are slowly becoming rickety and disconnected, then we should take a second look at AI. In conversation, LLMs behave as if they are persons, with personhood and consciousness implied, even though they lack agency, real-time sensory input, and many other components of consciousness. We have talked a lot about consciousness being an as-if phenomenon: if you poke at conscious reality, you find much—maybe all—of it is a constructed model. The brain behaves as if it is conscious, and therefore it is mindful.

If you follow that principle, it opens the door to considering AI conscious—not necessarily now, but maybe sooner than most people expect.

Any comments?

Jacobsen: None for now. That was sufficiently comprehensive. I am going to pitch the trait, and then you are going to describe why you think that trait appears: American serial killers. They have long histories of problems before the murders—long histories of prior crimes, assaults, sexual violence, arson, burglary. What are the common traits? And then I want your speculation as to why, because there are common traits among them. Before they engage in these streams of crimes, they are prone to a series of crimes leading up to that point.

Rosner: For instance, animal torture in childhood or adolescence is a notorious one.

Jacobsen: Yes—arson, burglary, cruelty toward animals. There is often truancy, fighting, or vandalism.

Rosner: And is not bedwetting part of the deal? I do not know.

Jacobsen: That one—the bedwetting piece—is a myth.

Rosner: Also, it is not a crime. It is not illegal to piss your bed.

Jacobsen: Strictly speaking, on crimes, they have a pattern like that. And the question is—there are other points we will get into later, including neurological abnormalities and different classifications of psychological disorders—but outside of those, what are your thoughts on these prior streams of crimes before they get to the most serious crimes, carried out at a prolific level?

Rosner: I do not know much about serial killers. I know everyone else in America consumes murder podcasts, and I do not like that stuff. I know a bit about Dahmer because we were in the same year in high school—we were about a month apart in age. So I know a little about him. He did the animal torture. Dahmer had alcoholism from an early age. He was an outcast at school and often drunk there. His family seemed like cold assholes. But I do not know whether serial killers have a “typicality.” I assume they do. You just mentioned a bunch of known commonalities.

Jacobsen: I am getting your reflections on why those appear.

Rosner: Dahmer was spectacular in his means of killing and in his other behaviours. But was he really killing for the love of killing? Or for different purposes? Ed Gein—the guy Silence of the Lambs was partly based on—said he wanted to be a woman, or used that as an explanation. He made skin suits from the bodies of women he killed. Dahmer wanted a sex zombie. He wanted a guy he could lobotomize into being a compliant, living sex doll. That never worked, so he would try to kill them.

I feel like some serial killers kill for power, control, rape, and domination. Many people prey on women. Easy prey are street prostitutes. But I do not know. One trait, obviously, is that they find out they can get away with it, and then keep doing it.

Some serial killers maintain normal-looking lives outside the killing. Others probably have to stay on the run, living transient, nomadic lives, so they cannot be traced.

I cannot give you productive input beyond that.

Jacobsen: There is another, more concrete pattern. They have very little empathy for victims. They have shallow or instrumental emotions—people are objects, not subjects. They are impulsive, yet also cold and methodical in their planning. They lack remorse. They tend to have entitlement or grandiosity.

Rosner: But is not childhood abuse—being abused as kids—one of the factors?

Jacobsen: We will get there.

Rosner: I do not know. The body-horror genre of film has a similar attitude. It treats the human body as something gruesomely interesting when violated, altered, or damaged. It is not a genre I like, but it is popular. And these people—serial killers—on some level like seeing that happen. It is spectacular to them. You do not usually know when someone’s flesh is violated. For some psychopaths, that spectacle outweighs what empathy would otherwise prohibit, as you said. Their priorities are all messed up.

Jacobsen: Next, interestingly, despite how strange they are, serial killers have a fantasy life, and that fantasy life escalates. They do not just snap; they develop violent and sexually violent fantasies over many years. They use fiction, pornography, or private daydreams to rehearse scenarios, and then gradually escalate from fantasy to low-risk acts—voyeurism, stalking, assaults. That becomes the basis for homicide. There is a logical psychological progression. Psychosynthesis is logical.

Rosner: You see something on a much smaller scale that might be similar to people and pornography. For many people who consume pornography—even occasionally—it takes more and more extreme material to get the same… well, the jizz. And I guess you are talking about an escalation in what it takes for someone with homicidal fantasies.

It gets more thrilling the closer you get to making the fantasies real. Part of the thrill is probably working out how you would do it. And in the case of a serial killer, they do it—and get away with it—and build toward doing it again.

I assume there is some remorse early on. In the small amount of material I have read, there is a pattern: they kill their first person, feel terrible about it, but then feel compelled to do it again.

I do not know. I do not know where we are going with this. We have never done this topic before. It is not an area I am well-informed in, and I do not have any particular insight.

Jacobsen: Then we can shift to the next point. Victims are a means, not an end, and relationships are transactional. Regarding your earlier point, they often experience early adversity, but this is not universal. It is common, but not universal. They may experience physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; neglect; unstable homes; parental substance abuse; and early exposure to violence. They tend to experience social and relational isolation and difficulty forming close, mutually satisfying relationships. They also tend to target groups that are easier to isolate and less likely to provoke a response from the central police or media.

Rosner: Street prostitutes, people with an addiction, people who are not tied deeply into a social network. 

Jacobsen: The last point: serial killers are usually male, but not exclusively. And there is no single race, class, IQ band, or occupation that defines them. So this pop-culture favourite—the white, high-IQ criminal mastermind—is not only unrepresentative, it is wildly misleading.

Rosner: I know that. Sometimes they are just violent idiots.

Jacobsen: Yes. The major caveat is heterogeneity. Even though there are commonalities, themes, and majority patterns, the overall group is varied.

Rosner: I know a bit more about serial sexual predators because I know about Cosby and Weinstein. Those tend to be—at least the ones I know about—older men who flourished before Me Too. I am sure serial sexual abusers share some of the same issues as serial killers. I have the feeling there is a modus that gives you impunity. You figure out how to get away with things.

Cosby preyed on women for decades. Weinstein preyed on women for decades. Both of them thought that, given who they were and how they operated, there would not be consequences. Or if there were consequences, their people could make the consequences go away.

With serial killers—brutal idiots—that is different. They do not have the same kind of agency as a Weinstein or a Cosby. They do not have money, fame, or power.

But I do not know what we are getting out of this. But impunity is part of it. They figure out how to keep doing what they have been doing. If they did not figure it out, then either they were lucky or they did figure it out. And if they did not figure things out—or were not lucky—they would get caught before they became too much of a serial killer.

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