Ask A Genius 950: Anxiety is Fear and Farts
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/17
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your form of anxiety?
Rick Rosner: I have lost 20 pounds over the past eight years because when I get anxious enough. I don’t shit my pants. I’ve only done that a few times, but I get the runny poos and can’t handle many carbohydrates. Somehow, the anxiety has altered the biome in my gut. The bacteria in my gut eat my carbs for me and then give me farts in return. Even so, my anxiety isn’t very debilitating. I’m naturally good-natured. I’m not all gloomy and depressed. People around me have anxiety that might be worse than mine. Oh, Carole is laughing, saying that’s not true. I don’t know.
Jacobsen: Carole, do you want to add anything to the session on anxiety?
Carole Rosner: We have different anxieties. Mine is situational. Rick’s is continual.
Jacobsen: I think mine is clinical. I have had mild anxiety for over a decade, potentially longer.
Carole Rosner: How can you not in this day and age?
Rick Rosner: That old joke goes, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you.” So, a certain amount of anxiety is reasonable. It propels you forward, but you don’t want to be stuck in it. It would help if you kept moving through it.
Jacobsen: Carole, may I ask you a question? Other than that one. What is the wisest thing you’ve ever heard someone say to you?
Carole Rosner: What has always stuck with me is something one of my bosses said at my first job in New York. We were at lunch, a significant function, and he said, “Take care of the people as you go up because you may need those same people as you go down.” I’ve always kept that in mind, treating all people as kindly as possible because you never know when you will reencounter them.
Rosner: Carole is super kind and conscientious. I’ve never really been in a workplace with her, but from what I hear, she’s a pleasant addition to every workplace. She makes cookies for everybody, picks up other people’s slack, and is highly organized. She’s an easy crier, which has saved her job various times because when everybody else is a steel-plated a-hole, someone who gets upset and cries is a welcome relief.
Jacobsen: What’s the wisest thing you’ve ever heard someone say to you?
Rosner: Anything along the lines of “Nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing or talking about.” William Goldman, the screenwriter, wrote The Princess Bride and Marathon Man. He said, applying it to Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” There’s very little predictability in entertainment, in casting and writing. You don’t know what’s going to work, what’s going to capture the public. Even if it were predictable, the a-holes in entertainment don’t know how to predict it. While studying physics in college, I knew I was lost. But I mistakenly believed that the people who confidently acted like they knew what they were talking about weren’t lost. No, they were more lost than I was. The current term is Dunning-Kruger, which is people who are so lost they don’t know they’re lost. You can’t underestimate other people’s incompetence or my own. Though I’ve also worked with highly competent people, and they’re a whole different pain in the ass. You don’t want a boss who’s more qualified than you because you’re always in trouble.
Jacobsen: How has anxiety served you well and disserved you, professionally and personally?
Rosner: Anxiety can also be called fear. Fear has made me a chicken shit in several ways. We did a whole session on this, where I talked about how I haven’t lived up to my potential, partly because I need the gumption to go for it. Like taking a shot at acting—I’m a pretty good actor, but I didn’t want to deal with the rejection. I haven’t had a paid writing job in a decade now, partly because of my fear of being told I suck after making a considerable effort. That’s how anxiety has shaped me. However, I overcome it by entering places where I shouldn’t. Like I was unqualified to be a bar bouncer, but I did it. I went to the gym with some big guys who talked about their adventures as bouncers, which sounded exciting. Even though I was smaller, we were lifting the same amount of weight, so I thought maybe I could do it. It was a dumb thing for a little Jew boy to be doing, but I did it, and it was fine. I’m not a good grappler or fighter. People hit me, and I forget to hit them back, but they’re drunk, so they don’t hurt me. I try to subdue someone with a sleeper hold, and sometimes we fall, which is fine because they’re out of the fight, and the other bouncers can handle the rest. So in some ways, I’m not a chicken shit, but maybe in essential ways, I continue to be.
Jacobsen: Do you think coffee drinking helps us?
Rosner: Coffee helps me stay awake in the afternoon. It makes me talk aloud and fast in these podcast environments. Every morning, I do a thing on PodTV where we discuss the day’s news. It’s just a bunch of yelling often. Maybe the coffee helps me wade in there. One of the first pills I take in the morning is a blood pressure pill, so I don’t have a stroke, but then I also drop coffee on top of that. Many people combine uppers and downers to find an effective way of being. Elvis did it, and it killed him. Elvis had prescriptions for 17 drugs when he died. He took uppers to get up in the morning and downers to go to sleep. The barbiturates paralyze your digestive system, making it harder and harder to shit. He gave himself an aortic aneurysm or the Valsalva maneuver, pinching off his aorta trying to pass a dookie that was five inches in diameter. If you hunch over and pinch off that aorta, it gives you a heart attack. According to one coroner, that’s what killed him.
Jacobsen: I don’t think you’re making a good argument for coffee drinking with anxiety.
Rosner: Coffee makes you poop. Coffee is good. Maybe Elvis should have drunk more coffee.
Jacobsen: At what point has anxiety been crippling for you? In other words, dysfunctional?
Rosner: It leads to me needing to do things I should do. I’ve been working on a book of one sort or another all my life. Have I published a book except for self-published ones on Amazon? No. It’s always in the future. I had a four-day book deal with Riverhead Press, but they rescinded it because the editor who offered the deal couldn’t get her bosses to sign off on it. I have the guts of many different books and have yet to get any of them published.
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