[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So I’m going to ask you what’s your experience in all your 60 plus years with follow through and not on any and all aspects of life projects whatever?
Rick Rosner: All right, so my follow through is spotty. I think that this might be something that is more likely to happen among high IQ people than people who don’t have super high IQs. People are always expecting super high IQ people for shit to be correlated with that like if you’re so smart why aren’t you a billionaire or like why haven’t you done this or that or whatever and studies, I don’t know if they’re good studies or what they are but that above an IQ of like in the 130s fucking IQ doesn’t correlate with higher instances of anything; happiness, success, or sanity. Somebody with an IQ 160 is going to have the same degree of same roughly life experience, like the odds that this person does shit or experiences shit is the same at 160 is at 120.
But I would say that going off into weird little cul-de-sacs might be something that is correlated with a higher IQ. I mean it’s certainly something you hear about with high functioning autistic people. There are a certain number of those people among high IQ people. When I went on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the year 2000, they asked me a question that was factually flawed, that was missing the correct answer which I didn’t know in the seat. I took my best shot and I got it wrong according to what their answers were and then later I found out they fucked up the question; their research was shitty. I also found out that eight other people had been invited back on the show because they fucked up their question. And none of these people knew the actual correct answer when they were in the chair because you’re just a fucker in the chair answering questions while they have a whole research department on a show that at the time was making a billion dollars a year in ad revenue. They could afford to get shit right but in my case they said fuck you. You can tell I’m still a little bit obsessed.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: I wrote them a shitload of letters and they said fuck you and so I sued them. They claimed that the phrasing of the question got them off the hook; they claim that they were asking for a different thing than the question was asking for. I’ve written for quiz shows and I looked at a 110,000 questions asked on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire around the world, I taught myself enough of each language or used whatever shitty translating shit they had in the year 2000. And then in the year 2001, once I filed suit to translate enough of these questions to look at them and see that they were full of shit, that the phrasing of the question absolutely meant what I thought it meant. They were asking for the absolute highest elevation Capital City among the world’s National capitals and this was part of the lawsuit but I looked at a 110,000 questions. That’s nearly 2 million words worth of questions.
And so that’s crazy obsessive. If you’re asking about follow through that’s fucking follow-through. Another instance of follow-through was I got hired to work on a show, as a writer by the network that I was suing. Jimmy Kimmel staffed me on his show and in the middle of all this I’m suing ABC and it’s an ABC show. So I became obsessed with doing a good job on that show and I would not let myself leave the office at night until I turned in 10 pages of material.
Jacobsen: That’s a lot of writing.
Rosner: Its insanity and it was very annoying to Jimmy Kimmel because like not all of it could have been good. I wrote a lot of pitches of like we could do this or we could do that. I mean I wish I could go back in time now that I know everything about writing jokes and writing for late night and I mean I’m a better writer now than I’ve been fired by Jimmy Kimmel for eight years than I was back then when I was turning in 10 pages a night. So that’s insane follow-through to the point where it really was just hurting how they thought of me at my job.
When I was checking IDs in bars, I loved checking IDs. I loved catching people with fake IDs and I developed a whole methodology; a Bayesian methodology where people got to sign points based on various characteristics they either had or didn’t have. Like, they don’t know what year they graduated high school; that’s three points. They don’t know their zodiac sign; that’s 5 points. 7 points and above and I could feel statistically confident that they had a fake ID. All sorts of characteristics like fed into this point model and I had to be able to card 95% of everybody within 10 seconds or less because otherwise you piss off customers. So I had this whole fucking insane methodology. I taught it to the cops in my hometown.
At one point I was working in three bars. So I would work like three months with no nights off out of my love of working in bars; that just insane follow-through. I had a display box built out of clear Plexiglas that I hung in the bar next to where I carted people in Brentwood, California across from the restaurant where Ron Goldman worked. He was the guy who got his throat also slashed by O.J Simpson and he was working out of that restaurant. So anyway, the bar I worked in there was across from the whole fucking OJ deal but I had a fake ID display case where if we caught an ID I would just throw it in the case, there’s your ID it’s in the case, because I thought this would act as a deterrent. People will say “Oh you’re going to get fucked if you come here with your fake ID” because that was a fancy neighborhood and the bar was there before the neighborhood became fancy or as fancy as it was. And so they were always calling with complaints and we were always getting undercover liquor control cops hanging out trying to bust us for any fucking little thing.
So not letting people in with fake IDs was kind of a big deal. And so my obsession happened to line up with what the bar needed. So that was okay though I was fired from another bar, The Ore house for taking the ID thing too far. Another follow-through; I didn’t think I gave myself the best high school experience I could have had. So I went back to high school once to see if I could do it right when I was 18. So it wasn’t as creepy as when I went back at age 26 though at age 26 I wasn’t going back to give myself a good high school experience I just thought it would be a good place to sit and think about the structure of the universe. There you go, that’s not as much follow through as it is obsession. And then there are other things where I just haven’t followed through at all like I’ve been writing a book for 35, 40, 45 years. Have I gotten a book published? No. Do I write on the book every day? I should but fucking I don’t. So, bad follow-through. My wife has the highest level of everyday follow-through of anybody I’m aware of. Nowadays, people don’t ghost only people, they also ghost responsibility. The way we live our lives now, people have become increasingly ghosty.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 