Rick Rosner On, 23: Cultural Intake, Smartphones, Marriage, and Transformative Inventions
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/08/10
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss Rosner’s unexpected preoccupation with wall-to-wall carpeting, from recurring dog urine stains and carpet shampooing to repairing a persistent ridge in an upstairs landing. Rosner reflects on experimental home-repair methods, the limits of surface cleaning, and mid-century carpeting as a symbol of postwar affluence. The conversation also explores how highly intelligent people can become absorbed in narrow, impractical problems that nevertheless reward curiosity, experimentation, and persistence.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you have a thing for carpets? Why this topic?
Rick Rosner: Our house has a lot of wall-to-wall carpet, whereas many high-end houses in LA now have hardwood floors with area rugs. That’s it.
And then you throw down fancy carpets, but our house is about two-thirds wall-to-wall carpet. Our house was built in ’66, so it’s about 60 years old. We moved in in ’98, so we’ve been here about 28 years.
Some of the carpet was here when we moved in. It’s white carpet, and we’ve had a series of dogs.
One of our dogs is a terrier, and terriers are their own people, right? They may follow the rules; they may not. So this terrier knows where she should go to pee, but she has probably peed on the carpet hundreds of times.
The carpet’s kind of disgusting, so we get it shampooed once a year. But some of the stains come back up. That can happen through wicking because, when a dog pees, urine can penetrate the carpet fibers and backing and soak into the pad underneath.
The carpet cleaners come with their extraction machines, and they wet down the carpet. They can remove the surface stains, but after they leave, residual contamination deeper in the carpet or padding can sometimes be drawn upward as the carpet dries, causing stains to re-emerge. So repeated surface shampooing alone may not completely solve a deep urine problem. Sometimes the backing or pad also has to be treated or replaced.
So instead of getting another shampoo that doesn’t do shit, I bought a wet vac, a carpet shampooer, for Carol’s birthday, which is like getting your wife a broom for her birthday. Not appreciated. But in this case, she’d shot down my other birthday suggestion. So I got her the wet vac and have been using it, and it works gradually.
If you hit the same patch of carpet repeatedly over a period of months, eventually you may make progress. But along with this, I’ve noticed other flaws in our carpet. On our landing upstairs, we put down some newish carpet 17 years ago. There’s a carpeted space at the top of the stairs that’s 11 feet by 5 feet, and it developed a hump.
It developed a ridge. I assume the carpet changed dimension slightly over the past 17 years, or otherwise loosened enough to buckle, which is enough to give you a ridge. So for the past week or so, I’ve been trying experiments to make the ridge go down. First, I tried tacking it down. I bought a set of hypodermic-style applicators for clothing, for gluing on sequins, from Temu for $1.30, and I’ve been filling them with watered-down glue, pushing them through the carpet, and injecting watery glue between the carpet and the pad. Then I put weights on top to flatten it out, which has taken care of about two-thirds of the hump, but still not enough.
Today, I went ahead and pulled up the corner at the edge of the carpet and cut off, in places, between three-sixteenths and a quarter inch from the edge. Then I used weights again to push the hump out, and re-glued the carpet down and re-tacked it.
So, adventures in carpet, which is a terrible use of my time. I should be doing physics or writing, but you know from your experience with high-IQ people that we can be cul-de-sac’d fairly easily. We’ll find a problem that captures our interest but has little practical value. At least I do. I get obsessed with ridiculous shit, and this past week I’m not obsessed with the carpet hump, but I’m interested in seeing whether I can come up with a methodology that makes it largely go away.
Wall-to-wall carpeting became a sign of middle-class and upper-middle-class affluence around the mid-20th century, right? Before then, you had farmhouses and regular houses with hardwood floors. That was simply what many floors were made of. Then the ’50s came along, and wall-to-wall carpeting became associated with comfortable, modern living.
And if you were going to put wall-to-wall carpeting throughout a house, you did not necessarily need finished hardwood underneath it. In houses built during the ’50s and ’60s, carpet was often installed over a subfloor rather than a finished hardwood floor. So our house is an artifact, a remnant of that era when wall-to-wall carpeting was widely regarded as desirable.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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