Ask A Genius 1546: Butt Picking, Poop, Dogs, and Longevity Science

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/16

Why does Rick Rosner openly discuss his butt, poop, and anti-aging pills with journalist Scott Douglas Jacobsen—and what does it reveal about health, shame, and science?

In this candid and darkly funny conversation, Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen navigate topics few would dare mix—bodily quirks, gut biology, aging, and self-improvement. Rosner begins by unpacking his compulsive skin-picking habit and the medical realities of hemorrhoid surgery and anal fissures with clinical precision and self-deprecating humor. The discussion then shifts to the biology of feces, the evolutionary disgust response, and a dog’s poop-eating habits linked to Cushing’s disease. From there, Rosner reflects on moviegoing, Kevin Smith’s unlikely romance, and the virtues of artificial sweeteners. The talk ends with longevity science—fisetin, curcumin, and rapamycin—offered as modern elixirs for an aging body and restless mind.

Rick Rosner: We should talk about my butt.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Please no. Why?

Rosner: I’m a picker. In clinical terms, it’s close to “excoriation (skin-picking) disorder.” Some autistic people “stim”—that’s self-stimulation to regulate attention—and picking can serve that function for some of us. Chewing gum might help, right?

But for the last decade or more, I’ve been running my hands over myself looking for things to pick. If I wake up at two or three a.m., I start doing that, which is bad, because the area I usually check is the underwear line. That area gets friction and sweat, which can cause folliculitis—pimple-like bumps—and then I pick them. A 65-year-old man shouldn’t have picked spots on his butt. Not that I even have much of a butt anymore. I weigh less than I used to—about twenty percent down.

Even though I try to shove a bunch of protein into myself—powder, shakes, everything—today Consumer Reports came out with a report saying that many brands of that stuff are high in lead and other heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium. But I don’t think I eat or drink enough of it to really mess me up.

So no matter how much protein I consume, still no butt. Fat and muscle atrophy with age and weight loss, so it just flattens out. That’s the butt report: not much of a butt, but plenty of places where I’ve attacked it.

Jacobsen: Anything else?

Rosner: Not about my butt.

Jacobsen: Complaints?

Rosner: I’m complaining about my complaining. I shouldn’t pick my butt. My nails are in good shape now because I don’t bite them anymore. Doing both would be unsanitary. Touching the perianal area and then rubbing my eyes can transfer bacteria or viruses and cause conjunctivitis—pink eye. I’m not fiddling with my butthole, though.

They took those out a few years ago, which helped a lifelong problem. What they removed was hemorrhoidal tissue and some anoderm—basically the skin and mucosa near the anus—not the “colon wall.” One possible complication is anal stenosis, or narrowing, if too much tissue is removed. That can make stools thinner and lead to anal fissures, which are small tears.

So after surgery, the diameter of my bowel movements went from normal—about two centimeters—to more like a cigar, maybe one to one-and-a-half centimeters. Recently I tore my butthole passing a normal-sized stool. That’s an anal fissure—just another thing going on with my butt.

Jacobsen: Why is poop the way it is, rather than something clean and machine-like? We humans make messy waste.

Rosner: Until about ten years ago, people weren’t very concerned about the bacteria in their gut. Now we know better. By the time you make a bowel movement, you’re not the only one “eating” the food in your digestive tract. Trillions of bacteria are also feasting on that same food. Many of them are beneficial, but by the time the stool leaves your body, it’s mostly bacteria, water, fiber, and waste products.

It’s definitely not good to get those bacteria anywhere else in your body, like your eyes—that’s how you get pink eye. We’ve evolved to stay the hell away from our feces. Once it comes out, the smell is revolting to us, which is evolutionarily useful. But to flies, it must smell fantastic, because there’s still plenty of organic matter left to eat.

One of our dogs has even eaten her own poop before. She has Cushing’s disease, which causes the adrenal glands to produce too much cortisol for too long. When it was untreated, she burned a huge number of calories, so she’d eat her feces. We got the Cushing’s under control, and she doesn’t do that as much anymore—though her breath is still terrible.

Jacobsen: The brown dog—you mean that one? I’ve met her. I’ve met both of them, actually. I’ve got stories about those dogs.

Rosner: Then tell one.

Jacobsen: I don’t want to.

Rosner: Come on, tell one.

Jacobsen: Fine. I was using your bathroom once—it’s small—and I was taking a big poop. There’s that little dog door for the tiny dog, the one you’re talking about. I’m sitting there, doing my business, kind of zoning out, and suddenly the dog gets really excited outside, bursts through the door, and just stands there staring at me. I look down at her, look back up, and she’s still staring. We had this weirdly intimate moment of mutual confusion—like, “Why are you in here?” “Why are you in here?” Then she spun around and trotted back out.

Rosner: That’s the zoomies. It’s when a dog suddenly gets excited for no reason and just runs around like crazy. We’re happy she still gets the zoomies, because she’s fifteen now. It’s kind of heartwarming to see her still able to run around like an idiot. She doesn’t understand much—dogs don’t in general—and she especially doesn’t. But she’s sweet. All right, enough about poop, butts, and everything. Rotten tomatoes.

Jacobsen: What’s your opinion of Kevin Smith’s movies—Clerks, Mallrats—since he has clever things to say about some of these topics?

Rosner: I’ve seen a few of them, not all, and they’re generally pretty entertaining. But I saw them at a time when I was more patient with movies. My wife and I used to see almost every major release. We went to so many screenings every weekend. Back then, people would stand outside malls in New York handing out passes to advance screenings. You’d watch the movie before release, and they’d ask your opinion to help decide how to market it or whether to edit anything.

We saw a ton of films that way. But now that we’re older, we’re less patient. We’ve seen so many movies that we get annoyed with mediocre ones much faster. So, as for Kevin Smith’s films—I enjoyed them back then. If I watched them again now, would I enjoy them as much? I’m not sure.

One time, I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard behind a willowy, obviously model-esque woman and a somewhat heavyset guy. They were clearly together—boyfriend and girlfriend, or husband and wife—from their body language. What immediately popped into my head was Kevin Smith. Because he’s a director, he’s funny, and I thought, “What could overcome being chunky and still land a willowy girlfriend?” The answer was simple: being Kevin Smith.

I walked past them, looked back—and it was Kevin Smith. I felt very pleased with myself.

So, the lesson? Never give up. If you want a willowy girlfriend, pursue your dreams. If you do well enough, maybe you can have that. And now there’s Ozempic, which is a much easier way to get less chunky.

But nothing against him for being heavy. He’s talented, funny, a good director, and a good writer.

Jacobsen: What’s your opinion on artificial sweeteners—Diet Pops, Stevia, Splenda, Aspartame, that sort of thing?

Rosner: I use them a lot.

Jacobsen: From what I’ve seen in the research, even when people claim they’re toxic, you’d have to consume absurd quantities for it to matter.

Rosner: When they tested saccharin on rats back in the sixties, they were basically feeding the animals half their body weight in saccharin. Of course that made them sick. I use maybe two packets of stevia or Truvia a day in my coffee. I just hope, first, that it doesn’t mess me up in some weird way, and second, that my body doesn’t interpret it as sugar and spike my blood glucose anyway. I don’t think it does. There aren’t enough calories in there to matter. Who knows, but I trust that by using artificial sweeteners, I’m doing less harm than if I used the equivalent sweetness of sugar.

Jacobsen: Have you mostly given up on your “peak pills” regimen?

Rosner: Not entirely, but I’ve gotten lazy about it. I used to lay out my pills for months at a time, but I ran out about a month ago—maybe longer. Now I’m just taking them straight from the bottles I have on hand. I really need to get my act together and reload my pill organizers.

I’m way down from my peak—at one point, I was taking close to seventy pills a day. Now, when I’m fully stocked and organized, it’s more like thirty-something pills a day. I’m off “peak pills,” but I still take a lot when I’m organized enough. My favorite right now is fisetin—especially for someone my age. Fisetin is a senolytic, meaning it encourages senescent cells—old, malfunctioning cells that the body hasn’t cleared—to undergo apoptosis, or programmed cell death.

As you get older, that clearing system weakens. Those old cells pile up, increase inflammation, and drain resources. Some even become precancerous. Fisetin helps remind those cells to self-destruct and get cleared out.

The dosing pattern is intermittent: you take a high dose, wait a few days, and then take another. You don’t need it daily. Some people do it weekly, biweekly, or monthly. You just need to get in there and deliver the reminder dose.

I’ve been taking a lot of that stuff lately. I also like curcumin—it’s an anti-inflammatory compound derived from turmeric.

Quite a bit. I like stuff that actually has studies showing some efficacy. There’s at least some evidence behind it.

Resveratrol is good, except not really, because your digestive system wipes most of it out. Maybe one percent ever reaches your bloodstream. Fisetin’s similar, but you can buy it encapsulated in lipids. That means they take the fisetin powder and emulsify it—basically mix it—with good fats like omega-3s from fish oil. The fat forms a droplet around the fisetin, protecting it from stomach acid so it makes it further into your digestive tract. The further it travels, the less likely it is to get filtered out by the liver and the more likely it is to be absorbed into your bloodstream.

That fatty version of fisetin can increase absorption by maybe five to twenty times. Same with curcumin. You can buy fancy lipid-encapsulated curcumin too.

If you’re really hardcore—like a billionaire tech bro—you don’t take fisetin orally. You’ve got a doctor or nurse on staff to inject it directly into your bloodstream. Resveratrol, curcumin, fisetin—all are much more effective when injected intravenously.

I haven’t looked into what it would take to get the equipment or supplies to inject myself. And I definitely don’t have the money for a full concierge medical setup. LeBron James supposedly spends around a million dollars a year on physical maintenance—training, nutrition, therapy, medical monitoring, the works. That number sounds exaggerated, but look at him: the guy’s forty, built like an NFL player, six-foot-eight or six-foot-nine, and could probably bench around 315 pounds. That’s impressive strength for his size and age.

So maybe it’s not an exaggeration. If he can spend a million a year, I could probably justify ten or twenty grand to have a doctor or nurse inject me with longevity compounds once a week. But I don’t. It just feels like too much—even if maybe it isn’t. Who knows?

I signed up for rapamycin. It’s technically an antibiotic, but it’s used off-label as a longevity drug. When you give it to animals—mice, worms, that sort of thing—you can double their lifespan or extend it by forty percent, even if they’re already old.

So I did that for about a month or two. Rapamycin has to be prescribed by a doctor, and it costs around $300 a month. I eventually found out that, based on some other health issues, maybe I shouldn’t keep taking it. So that’s the closest I’ve come to any kind of boutique anti-aging therapy.

But in America, if you want to spend one, two, or even five thousand dollars a month on fancy anti-aging treatments—you can. And maybe some of them work. I’m just not at that point.

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