Outcomes Rocket Podcast_Chris Mirabile: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket podcast. Excited to have you back here with us. Hey, look, we’re having a phenomenal time here, and I’m just really excited to cover a very important topic. What if we could give you the fountain of youth? Today, we’re going to talk about just that. His name is Chris Mirabile. Chris is a biohacker who’s aging in reverse, literally, with independent lab results to back it up. He’s a 39-year-old with a biological age of roughly 26 and continues to age at that rate, 31% slower than normal, according to the latest science. He’s managed to turn back time just by making simple tweaks to his sleep, supplementation, exercise, regime, and diet so that they’re turned for longevity based on the latest research rather than just short-term goals. Several tech billionaires have recently made headlines for their anti-aging initiatives, including Bryan Johnson, who spends $2 million annually on pelvic floor blasts, laser therapy, and a team of 30 doctors. Chris’s aging hacks, which have led to even better results than Johnson’s, and you too can easily implement for your own routine, can actually be done without spending a fortune, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today with him. He is the founder and CEO of Public Benefit Corporation NOVOS. With that intro, Chris, want to welcome you to the podcast.
Chris Mirabile:
Thank you. That’s a great intro. Nice to be here.
Saul Marquez:
Hey, man, good to have you here. And look, I want to learn about the fountain of youth. I want to learn how to be younger and feel better just as much as everybody else here does. I’m so super excited to have you here. Talk to us about you. What is it that got you into healthcare?
Chris Mirabile:
Great question. It took me a while to actually get into the industry, but I’ve always had an interest in it. When I was 12 years old, I picked up an issue of Men’s Health magazine. I started exercising every day. In fact, since I was 12, I haven’t got more than a week without exercising, except for-
Saul Marquez:
Amazing.
Chris Mirabile:
When I was 16 years old, I was in New York City on a school trip, and I suddenly had an unexpected seizure, it turned out that it was caused by a brain tumor, and so I needed emergency surgery and radiation, and I spent months and months recovering. And so obviously, that’s a period where I wasn’t in the gym. I think that’s excusable, though.
Saul Marquez:
I would say so.
Chris Mirabile:
Yeah, but that experience was it was transformative. It was life-changing. It helped me to understand that health is far more than that superficial side of health. As a teenager, I just wanted to be attractive and do well in sports, so that’s why I was going to the gym. And then, when I had the brain tumor, I realized that health is about biology, it’s about avoidance of disease. So a lot of the lessons and experiences that I derive from that are things that people don’t really experience until they’re in their 60s, 70s, or 80s, I was experiencing as a teenager, and so that planted the seed in my subconscious where as I was pursuing health into my 20s and 30s. I always had this question in the back of my mind: is what I’m doing now actually good for me in the long-term too? Because believe it or not, there’s a lot of things that are advised by either wellness advocates or the healthcare market that are not necessarily long-term focused, they’re really just focused on solving a specific problem or achieving a specific goal that is very short to mid-term focused, but it’s not long-term focused. And with that in mind, I continued to just do a lot of research and a lot of self-experimentation and tracking with different digital devices, and ultimately, arrived at the, I came to understand that longevity was a field of scientific study, and this was about ten years ago, when I came across a paper in a prestigious journal called Cell called The Hallmarks of Aging. And when I began to realize that aging itself is the root cause of all of these chronic diseases, from cancer to heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and so on, and that we now have an understanding of the biological root causes of the aging process and by extension, disease. That was a moment of epiphany for me. That was the aha moment for me to say, This is how I can really try to narrow my focus and understand if what I am doing is good for me, both in the short term and in the long term. And over the years, that evolved into, about five years ago, when I decided to start NOVOS.
Saul Marquez:
And so now, thank you for sharing that, by the way, and huge kudos for your workout discipline. Heck, a brain tumor, how dare you stop working out? Just incredible, so kudos for you there. And then the insights that you made based off of your experience. Like you mentioned, it accelerated what people go through late in their age, you went through that early in your age, and so you’ve evolved into this youth entrepreneur. Talk to us about NOVOS. What exactly is NOVOS doing for people?
Chris Mirabile:
Sure! We joked about the fountain of youth. I don’t want people to think that this is literally the fountain of youth. We take a very scientifically informed, pragmatic approach to the aging process. We have a team of seven scientific advisory board and medical advisory board members from Harvard Medical School, MIT, the Salk Institute, people like Dr. George Church, who invented genome sequencing in the 1980s. We take the science very seriously, but we look very closely at the scientific studies and the evidence for what lifestyles and what types of molecules that are found in nature, so we can sell them over the counter, can actually have a favorable impact on these hallmarks of aging. In fact, we’re the very first company in the world to ever create a formulation that simultaneously addresses all 12 hallmarks of aging in one single formula. And we file for patents on that, we’re doing in vitro and in vivo testing. In terms of the in vitro testing, we’ve found that we reduce DNA oxidation from irradiation by as much as 77% compared to the control. We have found that we reduce DNA damage from Chemotherapeutics, that we haven’t published this information yet. So I can’t give specifics yet, but it’s a significant amount of reduction in single and double-strand breaks of the DNA. We found that we reduce the size of senescent cells in human cells by an order of magnitude that’s comparable to the gold standard prescription longevity drug known as rapamycin. We have reduced the amount of what’s called oxidative ferroptosis in human cells as well, and we’re just getting started with that with the in vitro. And in vivo, we did a case study with human subjects between 39 and, I believe, 76 years old, where we found that 73% of them had a reduction in their biological pace of aging as measured by the Columbia University and Duke University, epigenetic clock known as Dunedin Pace. And 0% of the subjects had an acceleration in their pace of aging, which is almost as noteworthy as the fact that the majority of people slowed down their biological pace of aging. We also have human in vivo studies and mouse studies that are underway. And as I mentioned before, we take it very seriously the approach to really proving this out. I would say that we sit somewhere between pharma or biotech, traditional biotech that is, and supplements, so I would consider us to be a consumer, direct-to-consumer biotech company. In addition to selling supplements or formulations like this, we also do sell a biological age test kit that measures your epigenome and your telomere length. And this is essentially like the scale, right? So if someone was on a weight loss journey, they use the scale or body fat monitor, we are using the epigenetic test kits to give someone a objective measure of how they’re doing on their biological aging journey. And then we provide tons of information, knowledge for people, and free tools like, for example, AI-powered Selfie, a tool that will tell you how old your face or young your face looks, your skin health markers like wrinkling redness, pore size, and so on, and then, of course, we give guidance for how to improve all of those scores. So it’s all about entering into the NOVOS ecosystem, where we will provide free guidance on everything in your lifestyle, from diet to sleep to stress management, you name it, anything that has been found to slow down aging or extend healthspan and lifespan. And then, of course, we also sell our products for those who want to opt in to taking their health to the next level, so to speak.
Saul Marquez:
Love it, yeah. Thanks so much. So, it’s a platform where all of us can engage, learn more about things we could tweak. There’s a testing platform to get a baseline of where we’re at and then some supplements that are targeting these 12 areas of aging to help us prevent, not necessarily prevent, but slow down the aging process.
Chris Mirabile:
Exactly, yes, you will hear a lot of people say reversing age and so on, and maybe one day we can. And we can see in mice, for example, using something known as Yamanaka factors, they were able to reverse the biological age of certain organs, but not the entire mouse, so we’re a while before we can actually claim that with humans. What we can do, though, is slow down the pace of aging. And we see this, it’s not sci-fi, right? We see this in the real world. We all know that 60-year-old who looks 70, or the 60-year-old who looks and acts 50. And when you compare those two people side by side, the 50 and 70, they’re both chronologically 60, but one has clearly aged more slowly than the other. And we know that certain lifestyle practices like smoking can accelerate aging. There’s a whole lot of things that can actually decelerate aging, and I don’t think that the education has really been out there for people to understand how to slow down aging, and there’s a lot of intricacies and details involved in slowing down the process.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. Listen, I’m interested in slowing down aging, and I know a lot of the listeners are, too. If you think about it from a macro perspective, maybe a primary care physician, maybe an employer, how could they be thinking about this stuff? And maybe you could answer the question of how have you improved outcomes or made business better for people.
Chris Mirabile:
Yes, so for primary care physicians or healthcare practitioners, that entire industry, we’ve begun working with a number of them. So we just recently started our medical advisory board, the first member of that is Dr. Robert Luskin from USC, he’s a published author, he’s published hundreds of scientific studies, he focuses on longevity now, and we have a number of others that we’re in discussion with. We’ve begun working on wholesale arrangements with a number of medical clinics. We also, as part of that, we sell the supplements, the formulations, as well as the biological age test kits. And these biological age test kits are, just to clarify, I didn’t mention this earlier, what essentially are you measuring in these kits? You’re measuring morbidity risk and mortality risk. So, somebody who is at an accelerated pace of aging or has a greater biological age has a higher percentage likelihood of morbidity or mortality. And so this is a simple number to see if someone is trending in the right direction. Now, it’s not going to fulfill the same purposes as a comprehensive blood lab where you’re looking into the details and the granular details to try to maybe understand why somebody has an accelerated pace of aging, but this gives someone a simple way to understand if they’re improving or not, which is very motivating for the end user, for the patient. I would say that’s one of the more significant ways to motivate people to improve their health. We see it with our own customers, so we see people are constantly writing to us, telling us about how by slowing down, or seeing their score and then being motivated to slow down their pace of aging, they’re motivated to do things that they would not have otherwise been doing, and they’re excited to take their next test to see if they’ve improved their score, or even competing with friends and family members to see if they can get a better score than the others. But it is based on hard science, these test outputs.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you for that. Yeah, it’s interesting. And folks, we’ll have links to some of the studies that we’re covering here so that you could take a look if you’re curious, and certainly, links to the website. And look, there’s a lot we can learn from healthcare entrepreneurs, and so I wanted to ask you, what’s one of the biggest setbacks you’ve had and a learning that you’ve had from that, Chris?
Chris Mirabile:
Great question. So, one of the biggest setbacks I’ve had in my entrepreneurial career was, for my first startup out of college, I was a year out of college, I had gone straight into, private equity was my first job, but all the while, I was working on a startup company called Hotlist, which was a social network, and we scaled it to over 200 million people social plants. I was featured on television, in the newspapers, I opened NASDAQ, I was all over the billboards in Times Square. It was a dream come true for someone in their mid-20s, and we were in the process of potentially being acquired. We were being looked at by companies like Google, and Facebook, and others. There was one company that essentially made an offer to us and began the due diligence process with us, which ended up being prolonged and lasting about four months, which was getting us nervous because we didn’t have that much cash in the bank. The reason being that, as a social network, we were focused on user growth as opposed to revenue, and as a result, eventually the company that was intending to acquire us, it turned out that they weren’t planning to acquire us, they were just planning to make their own version of Hotlist in their home country, and they pulled the plug, and we didn’t have enough capital to be able to keep the business afloat. And so that was a very tough lesson in every sense of the word, lesson in life, and in humility, in personal growth, and as well as business perspectives. And so one of those perspectives I gleaned was to not neglect revenue to start, even in a business like a social network, have enough coming in to keep things afloat so that once you do that, you can then start venturing out into more experimental or, in the case of the startup NOVOS, more R&D-centric projects, rather than being fully dependent on the, One day the money will come.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, man, yeah, that’s a heck of an experience. And it sounds like it was like sky high and then down, but now you’ve rebounded with some really great lessons.
Chris Mirabile:
I have, yes, and to that point, I was on the verge of becoming a multi-millionaire at 26, 27 years old, and then I was left with zero. Literally, I had just a few thousand dollars in my bank account because I had invested everything into the business. And at the same time, Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, my apartment building was flooded, the basement was, so I had to leave. And when I was finally let back in by New York City, I found out that my apartment was looted. So not only did I not have any financial resources, all of my possessions were gone, at least my valuable possessions were gone. It was definitely a low point, but I would say that was one of the greatest experiences in my life, that combined with my brain tumor, because it’s when you hit those points that you really learn the most and develop the most. And so I wouldn’t do it again, but I also wouldn’t, if I had the choice, I wouldn’t eliminate that experience either.
Saul Marquez:
Wow, and a big part of what we have to do is be able to get out of a funk and like a setback. What advice would you give to leaders and entrepreneurs listening to this podcast today on how you did it? How did you rebound?
Chris Mirabile:
Great question. Part of what I was doing was really questioning myself, like my values, the things that I wanted in my life, and everything that was driving me to have started that company and be an entrepreneur, and so on. And so it was really like peeling back the layers of an onion to get deeper and closer to the core of who I am and what really motivates me to do the things that I do day in and day out and really reassessing that and eventually getting closer to the core of who I am as a person and what I want to do in my limited time here on this planet. And I think I got a lot closer to genuine intentions, and part of the reason to start NOVOS is based on that, is to want to help people with their health and to reduce the suffering, right? It’s, the sexy side of the business is to be younger for longer, but the less sexy side of the business is actually to reduce the suffering. Part of my vision for NOVOS is to contribute more than a billion years of healthy life to humanity through the education we provide, through the products we produce, and so on. And that’s one of the motivators that I don’t think I would have arrived at if I hadn’t gone through that experience. The other thing I would mention very quickly is, it’s important to also have balance in your life. I didn’t have as much balance in my life at that time in terms of, like I didn’t have a girlfriend or a wife. I had a loving family, but I was off on my own in the city, and so I wasn’t spending as much time with them. So, there’s all of these different things you can have in your life to fall back on in the sense of, if your business is gone, it’s not like everything is gone, but at that time, for me, it was as if everything was gone. My ego was really invested in that business and it was everything for me, and so it took me some time to get beyond that and reinvent myself and start over again. So I would encourage everyone to make sure you have that diversity in your interests in your life.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome, Chris. Thanks for sharing that, man. It’s a great story, certainly a testament to your character, and takeaways here, folks, is know yourself, dig deep, use these moments to really understand your why, your North Star, and revenue is king. You got to maximize that revenue as soon as you can. No, I really appreciate you sharing that, Chris. And so as you think about the work you’re doing, we’re talking about centenarians. It’s real to live beyond 100 nowadays. What are you most excited about?
Chris Mirabile:
Yeah, and just to be clear, a lot of people say like, why would I want to live so long? And so to want to be very particular about this point, it’s about increasing your healthspan with your lifespan, so we want to close that healthspan-lifespan gap. In the United States. We’re actually increasing the healthspan-lifespan gap. In other words, people are getting sick younger and they’re living long lives into their 70s, let’s say, relatively speaking, long lives, but they’re going 10, 15, 20 years sick. And what we actually want to do is enable people to live to 100 or 105, 110, but only have two or 3 or 4 years where they’re sick, right, at the very end, or ideally they pass away, like Jeanne Calment, the longest-lived person in history, 122 years old.
Saul Marquez:
He was 122? Wow.
Chris Mirabile:
Yeah.
Saul Marquez:
When did he die?
Chris Mirabile:
It was a female. Women tend to live a little bit longer than men.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Chris Mirabile:
And she, I don’t recall exactly, I believe it was in the early 2000s that she passed away.
Saul Marquez:
Wow. 122?
Chris Mirabile:
Yeah, and she died of old age, so to speak, right? She didn’t have a disease. She just passed away peacefully.
Saul Marquez:
That’s cool. Yeah, I love that, man. It’s possible. And it begins with, what’s really cool, Chris, is you talk about knowing yourself, and there is this element of knowing yourself and like, psychologically, but there’s also this element of knowing yourself biologically. And the work that you guys are doing is really helping us get a glimpse into our insides and what is exactly happening on our insides. When’s the last time you guys have done that? A part like, the one time I do it every year is when I go to my primary care physician and do my blood work. It’s the essential things that you find out from your primary care physician, but this is like next level. What Chris is offering us is helping us understand those 12 aging factors that could potentially help us out. So like, how much is a kit, man? I’m just curious, like, how do I get one and how much does it cost?
Chris Mirabile:
Yeah, so the biological age test kit is $349, and if you buy more than one kit, it’s then $299 per kit, and as I mentioned before, it has three different tests in it. The one that we emphasize the most is the Dunedin pace of aging clock, because that’s the most accurate and precise biological age clock out there. There are plenty of other companies coming out with clocks, but they don’t compare in terms of the ICC value, which is the precision of the clock. And this clock has been published in more than 35 scientific studies at 20 different labs around the world, it is the ultimate, and we’re agnostic to what tests we worked with, this is the one that we chose after more than a year of research. The second result is your biological age. We included that to scratch the itch. A lot of people are curious about how old they are biologically, but it’s not as accurate as the Dunedin pace. And then the third test is telomere length, which is the end caps of your chromosomes that protect your DNA, and those get shorter as you age. You want to make sure that yours aren’t excessively short, so they’re beyond what’s known as the telomeric brink, or too long. But as long as you’re somewhere in that sweet spot, then you don’t really have to pay too much attention to that result. Then the NOVOS Core product, which is our foundational patent-pending formula, that is 12 different ingredients, it’s got almost seven grams of actives, which is far more than most supplements; like we’re talking like five, six times more than most supplements provide. The price of it is between $79 and $109, depending on if someone purchases one time or if they subscribe for a year. And then the next product we have is NOVOS Boost, which is one single ingredient, it’s called NMN or nicotinamide mononucleotide. This is a longevity ingredient that has been made popular by researchers like Dr. David Sinclair at Harvard, and this increases your NAD+ levels, which has a number of benefits related to DNA repair, energy production, and so on. And that’s between $32 and I believe just over $40, depending on which package you purchase.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you. It’s all within reach, it’s all something that we can all consider, and if you’re looking for a way to take your health and longevity to the next level, I’d say try it out. I’m going to try it out, Chris. I’m going to buy one of these tests, and then I think it would be cool if we just jump back on and maybe just share. I’m scared to find out what my biological age is, but hey, that’s the beginning of it, right? Like I want to know. You can’t be afraid of the truth. Maybe what we could do, Chris, is I’ll buy one of these from you and we could dive into my results on the podcast.
Chris Mirabile:
Yeah, I’d be happy to. And then we can also talk about different things you can do to improve the score. Even if it’s good, I’m sure things you can do that take it even further.
Saul Marquez:
Damn, okay. All right, guys, we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna do this, and it’s gonna be fun. Thanks for the opportunity, Chris. Where can people find out more about you, the company, and ways to make their life longer and healthier?
Chris Mirabile:
People can find out more about me on my personal blog. It’s SlowMyAge.com where I blog about the longevity field and definitions of it and help to bring some clarity to to the field. I also post my own biological age results and physiological markers that I track and then talk about my own lifestyle on that blog. On Instagram, and Twitter as @slowmyage, and then NOVOS is NovosLabs.com. It’s N O V O S labs.com. And we’re on all of the social media platforms as @NovosLabs.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. Chris, This has been fun. Folks, I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Check out the show notes with all the things that we discussed, as well as links to all of the different tests and products that Chris mentioned today that could help make you healthier and live longer. Chris, really appreciate your time today.
Chris Mirabile:
Likewise, Thank you for having me.
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