Ask A Genius 1573: Epigenetics, Exercise, and Everyday Pleasures

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/25

How can epigenetic workouts and small daily pleasures support healthier, longer lives?

In this lively exchange, Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen riff on epigenetic longevity hacks, debating whether clustered or spaced-out workouts best trigger anti-aging benefits. They compare exercise to intermittent fasting, wander into botanical philosophy via aspens, willows, and backyard redwoods, and treat vegetables primarily as respectable butter-delivery systems. From sushi fish and popcorn to tiramisu, strawberry shortcake, and chocolate-heavy biscotti, Rosner maps his shifting sweet tooth onto the realities of aging. The result is a humorous meditation on bodies, habits, and small daily pleasures that keep life interesting, even as cheesecake loses its charm.

Rick Rosner: I’ve got a quick topic. I’ve got a topic. One of these longevity guys on Twitter says that working out may be worth more than any number of drugs—that epigenetically it changes you. If you work out a shit ton, it supposedly makes some helpful genes kick in and join the fight against aging. I work out a lot, but my workouts tend to cluster at a particular time of day. So I wondered: epigenetically, is it better to space them out throughout the day? In the movie Conan the Barbarian, young Conan is enslaved and forced to push a giant mill wheel—the “Wheel of Pain”—for years. He’s basically powering some kind of grain mill or heavy mechanism, like one of those draft animals dragging a big spoked thing around. According to the logic of the movie, that’s how he turns into Schwarzenegger. So he’s effectively working out all day, every day. Lately, once I’m awake, I’ve been making sure I do a couple of sets every couple of hours. Will that do anything? Who knows?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It’s quite equivalent to periodically fasting for at least eighteen hours or something. That’s probably good for you.

Rosner: Yeah, I want to do that. That does not sound very good. I’d rather—look, I’ve got a stupid universal machine in the attic. I can do a couple of sets every few hours. Three sets every two hours, three sets, take a nap, do some more sets. I can do that.

Jacobsen: What’s your favourite type of tree, and why?

Rosner: I have a favourite thought about a tree, which is that there’s no single “best” tree. Otherwise, all trees would look the same. Different trees follow different strategies for gathering resources, mostly sunlight. When you look at trees with a full canopy, there’s not much light that gets through. Unless it’s fall or winter and the leaves are gone, a tree with whole leaves has a dense setup to capture as much light as possible. But the shape of the leaves varies widely, so obviously there’s no one best design. There is something like a best in terms of dimensionality: most broadleaf trees have thin, flat leaves—basically sheet-like, “two-dimensional” structures compared to their size. 

That part seems settled, though not wholly, because cactuses mostly use thick, fleshy stems and spines instead of normal leaves, and pines and other conifers go with narrow, needle-like leaves. So there’s a loose consensus that many leaves are relatively flat, but the exact shape and structure of that flat surface is absolutely not settled. All right, favourite kind of tree. I like the idea—creepy as it is—that poplars or aspens can basically be one organism. In some species, what appears to be a whole stand of separate trees over a large area is actually a single clonal colony, all genetically identical and connected underground. They sprout from the same root system. 

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They’re all connected underneath by that shared network. That’s interesting and creepy. I don’t know if that makes it my favourite tree. What else? I like a bushy, well-rounded tree—the kind with a trunk that goes up and then goes foof, and you get a big sphere of leaves. That’s a good-looking tree. I also have an apple tree in the backyard that I grew from a seed. It’s about fifteen years old now, this spindly thing that’s never been properly pruned. It turns out that to grow a productive apple tree, you generally need to prune it—pick a strong central trunk, keep some solid scaffold branches, and cut back a lot of random shoots so it has a good structure and can put energy into fruit. This apple thing is just a bunch of snaggly little branches going everywhere and will probably never sprout an actual apple. But it’s my tree. I raised it from a seed in an apple I ate. So those are my favourite trees. I also have an old cactus in the back that keeps surviving—when it gets too big, part of it breaks off, takes root, and grows again. 

Jacobsen: Any favourite trees? My favourite is the willow.

Rosner: Yeah.

Jacobsen: I love that they’re tall and then they droop down. I love that.

Rosner: Yeah, that’s okay. That’s an okay tree. We’ve also got a redwood in our backyard, which is cool. It’s cool to have a tree that’s around a hundred feet tall. And sometimes a bald eagle will sit on top of it—we’ve seen that a couple of times. If it’s not a bald eagle, we’ll get owls. I assume the owls are doing whatever owls do up there. But that redwood is a pain in the ass because it’s at the corner of our lot, and it has the potential to drop debris on our neighbours’ property. Our neighbours are always nervous about the tree. So we’re always getting it trimmed to make sure it won’t drop anything on them. One of our neighbours has fancy friends—and an Oscar nominee, if she has a backyard party. If we don’t keep our tree trimmed, an Oscar nominee could get bonked on the head. That would not be good. So we like our tree. We don’t like the cost. It used to be a couple of hundred bucks to prune. Now, the next time we get it looked at, it’s going to be fifteen hundred American bucks—not your twenty-five-percent-off Canadian dollars. So.

Jacobsen: What’s your favourite vegetable? 

Rosner: Well, no, because I don’t love vegetables. But anything you can sauté in butter, I’m good with. I’m not often satisfied by Brussels sprouts, but if they’re done right, they’re excellent. And an artichoke is good because you can use it to scoop up your buttery sauce. What’s yours? Spaghetti squash is good again, because you can hit it with a ton of butter. So I guess what I’m saying is any vegetable that is a device for—

Jacobsen: Do leafy greens count?

Rosner: Yeah, they do.

Jacobsen: Well, kale. Kale salads are delicious. It’s like the majority of what you can get with—

Rosner: I do not love kale. I do not love kale. And my wife, for a long time, believed in spinach, and she put spinach in a ton of things that shouldn’t have had spinach in them, because when you cook spinach, it gets really droopy. And also the idea that you put spinach in there because it has more iron than any other leafy vegetable—no. That was a mistake made in the 1930s. Someone misreported the amount of iron in spinach. Spinach is no richer in iron than any other leafy vegetable. So. Fruit. Raspberries—great. Cherries—great. Blueberries are way better, depending on whether they’re crunchy, yeah. Suppose they’ve turned mushy, no. Blackberries—great if they’re sweet. But raspberry, as a flavour mixed with chocolate, is my favourite shake or ice cream flavour. Baskin-Robbins used to have chocolate raspberry truffle, and it cost extra because it was so deluxe.

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Jacobsen: What’s your favourite meat?

Rosner: Sushi meat—meaning fish.

Jacobsen: Which fish? Tuna, salmon.

Rosner: Yellowtail. What is your favourite grain? It’s tricky because you don’t like carbs. You could say cookies plus carbs.

Rosner: I like carbs—just carbs don’t always agree with me if I’m stressed. Wheat Chex is my favourite Chex, but that doesn’t mean wheat is my favourite grain. Some obscure grains are really crunchy when cooked right. I mean, corn is a grain, right? So you’ve got popcorn. You can’t beat popcorn. It depends on how you’re preparing the grain. And some of my preferences might be about whether you can make them savoury enough by mixing them with butter.

Jacobsen: What’s your favourite dessert?

Rosner: Tiramisu is delicious. I still have a sweet tooth, but it’s not as dominant as it used to be. I often get excited about dessert in theory, but when it comes down to specifics, I’m like, no thanks. We go to the Cheesecake Factory, and I’m excited, and then when it comes down to picking a type of cheesecake and eating it, it takes me a week to get through a piece because I’m only suitable for a couple of bites, and it’s not that satisfying, which is more about me getting older than the cheesecake. But okay: strawberry shortcake with whipped-cream icing, not buttercream. Buttercream is gross, but whipped cream is a nice icing. You rarely see it on anything but strawberry shortcake. Anything with whipped cream in the mix, I’ll like.

Jacobsen: Favourite snacking food? Can’t say Triscuits.

Rosner: No. A nice cheesy cracker—there are these Nut Thins, the cheese-flavoured ones made out of almonds. It’s a good cracker, though really a bad cracker, because it’s made out of almonds. I shouldn’t be eating almonds because if you’re prone to kidney stones, you don’t want them. And almonds require a considerable amount of water to grow. It’s wild how much water it takes. So it’s a good-tasting cracker, but not a cracker I should be eating. Salted matzah is good. There’s a brand called Moonstrips. Regular matzah is bland—it’s only as good as whatever you put on it—but when it comes pre-salted, it’s excellent.

Jacobsen: Favourite seasoning or spice?

Rosner: One of those blends that pretends to be about all the different spices but is really predominantly salt. Old Bay—technically a Chesapeake seasoning, not Cajun—is pretty salty. Whatever they put in the breading for Popeyes—I love Popeyes, mainly because they take chicken and make it salty.

Jacobsen: What’s your favourite energy drink, regular drink, sweet drink, and alcoholic drink?

Rosner: My favourite basic drink is just cold water—soft water, not super minerally. And I like diluted Diet Coke. You take the Coke and then do half Coke, half water. That’s decent. As for sweet drinks—setting aside the racial-prejudice stereotypes about which sodas Black people are supposed to like—grape soda is delicious. When we go out to the fish restaurant where they give you a cup and set you loose on the beverage machine, I’ll get water, Diet Coke, cream soda, a shot of black cherry, and whatever. Mixed, it’s gross.

Jacobsen: Cold drink, hot drink—favourite?

Rosner: Coffee that’s all chocolated up, whether cold or hot. And if you can get some dark-chocolate flavouring in there, even better. There’s this place we go when we visit our kid in London that makes hot chocolate with 72% dark chocolate. You know how chocolates have different percentages—the higher you go, the less sugar and the more cocoa you get. The low 70s are the sweet spot.

Jacobsen: All right, so what else do you have? Favourite cheese or artificial drink?

Rosner: Favourite what-used-to-be-cheap restaurant that’s an actual restaurant would be the Old Spaghetti Factory. There used to be one in Hollywood, but they shut it down around fifteen years ago. You used to be able to take the whole family out to dinner there and get out with a tip for under twenty-five bucks. They made buttery spaghetti with mozzarella cheese on top—which is super salty—and you got a salad, a little loaf of bread, and dessert. It was super cheap. It was awesome, but they sold the building. Now we have to go out to Arleta or somewhere if we want Old Spaghetti Factory. Favourite tea? I don’t have a favourite tea. Carol brings home some chai latte mix, which is fine—it’s tea dressed up so it almost tastes like milky coffee. My Favourite protein bar is a chocolate mint Builder Bar.

Jacobsen: What’s your favourite baked good that Carole makes?

Rosner: She makes delicious cookies, but I’ve been losing my taste for sweets compared to how I used to be. I still eat a ton, but whatever she makes with more chocolate chips than she wants to put in—those are my favourites. She makes mandel bread, which is a hard biscotti-like thing. That’s my favourite. My favourite cookie is probably chocolate-dipped biscotti. I need to get to her when she’s blending the dough so we can add way more chocolate chips than she wants. You need a couple of chocolate chips in every bite; otherwise, it’s just a hard, sweet cookie bread. Thanks for all the questions.

Jacobsen: You’re welcome. That was good. Those could be thematically organized. 

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