Born to do Math 81 – Turning to and Chanting for God
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have OCD and obsessions in math and health. These may have played a role in the mathematics aspects of being “born to do math.” What have been your obsessions in the past?
Rick Rosner: Yes, I have got OCD fairly. Unless, you watch me closely. You would not necessarily notice it. I am not as OCD-d out as the worst people, but I am probably 40% of the way there. Then you might make the argument that high IQ people might have a tendency to get to pursue odd interests way too far.
If I can list the stuff that I have been obsessed with over the course of my life, let’s start with age six where I obsessively turned in clockwise circles and chanted to God. Around age ten, I became obsessed with figuring out how the universe worked and started taking all sorts of notes on little scraps of paper.
In junior high, I briefly became highly interested in solving one of those math problems that everybody wants to solve, but nobody in the world has been able to solve for decades or centuries. So, I pursued trying to prove the four-color theorem or trisect an angle or Fermat’s Last Theorem. There were periods of going after that stuff.
Then in high school, I became obsessed with transforming myself into someone who could get a girlfriend which included changing the way I talked, I went from somebody who got a doctor’s note to get out of PE to somebody who did 6,000 push-ups a day.
So, that was the beginning of an exercise obsession, beginning 17. The obsession with being a guy who could get laid.
I rolled over into my early 20s, where I became a bouncer and a stripper and then developed obsessions around how many bars I could work in or how many jobs I could hold simultaneously. After a bad breakup, every time I felt bad I would go out and get another job to the point where I had eight jobs simultaneously.
All of them five hours a week or no more than ten hours a week each while I was going to college. But among the sub-obsessions to having a bunch of jobs or “how many bars could I be stripping in?” and “how many bars could I be bouncing in?”, I became obsessed with catching the most fake IDs of anybody, becoming the most accurate fake ID catcher at the doors of bars ever.
I developed a model, a probabilistic schema for catching IDs to help me decide the hard cases. I would to think that there were periods in my bouncing history for months at a time. I was close to 99% accurate at nailing fake IDs and close to a 100% accurate at not turning away anybody who was of age when most bouncers will maybe catch about a third of the fake IDs that come past.
We’re talking during the fake ID era, say 60’s through the 90’s when you wanted to have a fake ID to go to bars to try to hook up. That era’s over because now we have the Internet for hooking up.
At various times, I have been obsessed with getting my body fat down to under 5%. Right now, it is around 4.8 to 5 something percent depending on what I have been eating for the past few days, whether the diuretics are working.
Right before I turned 21, I became obsessed again with trying to figure out how the universe worked and that has lasted for the last thirty-six and a half years. I am more obsessed with it sometimes than at other times, but it is a long-term interest, sometimes obsessive.
In 2000, I was on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ and got a flawed question that led to me basically losing the game and became obsessed with studying millionaire questions to prove that they screwed up.
I ended up analyzing about a hundred and ten thousand millionaire questions from close to 20 different countries. So, that required me to be able to start… this was before Google Translate, I had to become my own Google Translate and learn how to decode millionaire questions in a bunch of different languages.
I got hired to be a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live! and became obsessed with getting stuff on the air and cranking out a huge amount of material. For my first two years there, I did not allow myself to go home until I generated at least 10 pages of material per day, which is nuts and also was annoying to Jimmy.
But while I was there I wrote close to a hundred thousand jokes. Right now, I have got this YouTube series with my conservative buddy Lance where I posed shirtless for a painting he is been working on for almost a year and we argue about politics and given my anxiety about the current political situation and maybe a little anxiety because my dad is not well.
When my stepdad became seriously ill, I started taking huge numbers of vitamins and supplements; about 70 a day, which I continued to do. But seeing my stepdads mortality made me obsessed with becoming as healthy as possible at least in terms of filling myself with pills.
Now, that my real dad is having health issues plus the anxiety about Trump world and being shirtless in this YouTube series. I have been working out even more obsessively than I have in the past. I celebrated my 27th anniversary of not missing a day at the gym since 1991.
For the past four years, I have gone to the gym at least five times a day except for four days out of those four years where I fell asleep before my fifth workout. For the past year, I have done at least a hundred sets of weights a day and for the past 43 days I have done at least 200 sets a day.
So does that cover? Oh! I have written the longest book in the form of a tweet thread that is ever been written. It’s half of a sample from a book I am trying to get a book deal for and it rolled into being a bloggie thing when I felt I couldn’t give away too much more of the book for free. Its two thousand tweets long. That probably covers most of my obsessions.
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