Jeff Baker on Mike Rinder

I worked with Mike Rinder on several events. And that’s mainly when I would work with him. He was a one of our executives that would speak at the events. He would put together, you know, speeches or visuals and stuff. And we would usually end up working in a bay, an edit bay.

And while many people will be in there pitching, many times I’d turn around and find him just asleep on the back couch. Edit bays have couches in them so you can sit down and relax while you’re doing it. And he took advantage of that many times when we are under the gun to get this thing done in the next several hours because you’re, you’re on the time clock. The event happens at a certain time and you have to be out the door with the video at a certain time. And he would see fit to just lounge or sleep sometimes while we were doing the editing.

And it made it very hard for other people to get the whole event done. And it was kind of like an anchor dragging the boat, you know, when there was an exact task to do and he wouldn’t get it done efficiently. He’d kind of either be very arrogant about it or sleep his way through it, one or the other, yeah.

At the live event site, the people that speak at the event would typically run through their speech before the event and there was a lot of drilling that went into our live international event. He would speak at them, as did other speakers. And the main producer would actually be running through everybody to make sure that it was a high-quality presentation.

And what I noticed with him is while others were speaking, he would be kind of just falling asleep or kind of lounging in the back or—he wasn’t involved in the production. It wasn’t something that it was connected to him as a responsibility, it seemed. When he talked and ran through his speech, there was a lot of things that needed to be corrected, it would have to be redone or, you know, rerun or worked over so that it was actually communicating.

And the things that were being communicated about were obviously fantastic, you know, that the subject matter is extremely interesting, you know, how Scientology is helping people in the world or making it a better place. It’s kind of the easiest thing you could probably talk about because it’s such a great subject. And for him, it seemed to come across as a chore.

I think Mike Rinder could be summated by saying “arrogant.” That would be probably the best word that describes this guy, arrogant.