Chris Mirabile: How I Slowed Down Aging

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And you're about to listen to a very interesting conversation I had with Chris Mirabal. It's a little bit different than the typical one. Chris is the founder and CEO of Novos Labs. They're a consumer biotech focused on longevity and how to live a longer life. He's also a serial entrepreneur, a brain tumor survivor, and a dedicated biohacker. He's actually figured out how to reduce aging in himself by 37%, and he's shaved 13.6 years off his biological age, which we get to later in the conversation.

But to start the conversation, we frame this whole thing under living well in the midst of loss, because Chris has been through a lot of loss in his life. At 16, he got diagnosed with cancer, brain tumor, got him in to be an entrepreneur because he wanted to make a real difference in the world. When he became an entrepreneur, his first company, Hotlist, exploded. It was one of the hottest ones out there right when Facebook was going out too. It's a social network as well. And he was going for the acquisition, and the company that was acquiring him stole all his IP and tanked his business overnight. At the same time, he got hit with Hurricane Sandy and lost his house. And he lost his mom to cancer.

So he's been through a lot. And he walks through some positive health practices that he uses to stay positive and keep moving forward and things that we can all learn from. And then we get into his aging and how he has hacked the bio of his body to learn how to slow down the aging process and go through 10 biological causes of aging and what we can do about them. And right at the end, he gives some super tactical tips on how we can all live a better, healthier life so we can live a lot longer than the typical person. And not just age-wise, but true biologically and the internal health as well. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. What's happening, make it happen, family?

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How can I get you on my calendar easily? Chili Piper can make that happen for you. Be sure that you're checking out all these great tools. And now, let's pass it over to John to find out who's joining him today. See you soon, everybody. Chris, welcome to the podcast, my friend. It's good to meet you. Likewise. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. You know, when your people reached out, I was really intrigued with some of the stuff that you're working on. I would love to dive into it now. But why don't we give the audience here a little background? Because this conversation is going to be a lot about, you know, mental but personal health as well, but also the journey of dealing with loss in a lot of ways and some tools that we can use to help better ourselves as we deal with that loss.

So I'd love to hear, because you've had a very, very interesting background from 16 years old, getting cancer all the way through to starting a few businesses and getting screwed a couple of times. So could you give us the background here to get us to where we are? Sure. So I'll start when I was 12 years old, because it will be relevant later on in the conversation. I started to get interested in health. I saw Men's Health magazine on the newsstand. I picked it up, and I was inspired by the people in the magazine. I wanted to be in good shape. I was a scrawny 12-year-old. I wanted to build some muscle and be attractive. And so my interest in health was really superficial at first, as you might imagine, for a 12-year-old.

I was going to say most 12-year-olds. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to, you know, be attractive for the girls in school. But by the time I was 16 years old, my interest in health evolved, and it was fueled by an event. I was in New York City. I suddenly had a seizure, and it turned out that the seizure was caused by a brain tumor. I had a large mass above my left temporal lobe, which is above my left ear. And it required an emergency surgery to remove it. So I was treated at NYU Medical Center, and they administered radiation and were able to fortunately remove the brain tumor. But going through an event like that naturally had a very big impact on me. And I started asking myself existential questions that typically people aren't asking until they're in the later years of their lives.

I was asking, when I was a teenager, things like, what do I really want to derive from my life? What is the value of life in the first place? I started to reframe my thinking in many ways. For example, I, for the first time, found an appreciation in feeling pain and frustration. You know, there was pain and frustration recovering from, for example, not really having a sharp memory. It was SAT year in high school, and I was on anti-seizure medications, and there was inflammation in my brain from the surgery. And my memory was absolutely horrible, and the frustration that that brings while trying to do well in school is, it was unlike anything I had experienced before. Yet, I grew to appreciate it in the sense that I was here living still, and I was able to feel this frustration.

And the alternative was I would have been gone, and I wouldn't have been able to experience anything in life, including the joys. So it really changed how I looked at life, my life, what I wanted to derive from it. It also largely impacted my decision to become an entrepreneur, because I wanted to be proactive about my life, to make an impact, to do more than just kind of being a cog in the machine, so to speak. I wanted to actually, I had visions for what I wanted to do in my life, and being an entrepreneur was the way that I identified with being able to do that. One of the things that struck me when I was reading about your background was, when you were in the hospital, getting your, you know, taken care of and everything else, you said it gave you a view of what kind of old age would be, right?

And we're going to tie this to your health and the things that you've been focusing on, but could you talk a little bit about that, about how that perspective kind of changed you as well as, like, almost thinking like you're on your deathbed, and this would be you at 80 years old, per se, or this is what people in the later stages of their life go through. Could you make that connection? Because I think that's a powerful one right there. Sure. So, yeah, the experience itself could have meant the end of my life, right? We did not know if when I entered the operating room, whether I would wake up again from it. And so the thought of, you know, the uncertainty of that, and the thought that maybe this was the end, it led me to thinking about, in my future, ideally, you know, we're all going to have to encounter death at some point.

It's inevitable. It's inevitable. It's one of those things, topics that we don't like to talk about, but we know it is one day going to strike us just like it has to everyone before us. But there are different ways to arrive at that final destination, right? For a long time, you have a chronic illness or multiple chronic illnesses, and the final decades of your life can be very painful. Or you can live a very healthy life until the very end, and you have a very, very short gap between what's known as your health span, the period in which you don't have a chronic illness, and your lifespan, the point at which you pass away. And so the thought of having a chronic illness again was something that, having gone through the experience with the brain tumor, the realization of, you know, how powerful something like cancer or cardiovascular disease or neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's and so on, how impactful those could be.

I just never wanted to have to go through that again. And so that really, really put an emphasis on health. And as I mentioned before, that more superficial aesthetic interest in health evolved into a biological interest in health. How do I maintain health or, as it's known in science, cellular fitness? How do I keep my cells fit and prevent things from going awry and getting ill? Yeah, it's always amazing to me when you see there's, I mean, there's plenty of memes out there of, you know, what 85 year olds look like, right? And there's one 85 year old who's super fit. And they're like, you know, still running a triathlon. And there's another 85 year old who's sitting in a wheelchair, you know what I mean, and barely making it through the day.

And it's like, you know, you choose, you can actually choose which life you want towards the end. And it has a lot to do with what you do on the way there, right? And I'd love to get into that. I want to go back to that entrepreneurship piece, because you got that, you got that itch, you wanted to make a difference. And then you got screwed pretty hard. Talk to me, like, you got the new, you got the, what was it, the award that you got? Best business plan, yeah, NYT, yeah, the business plan competition with Hotlist, right? Yeah, sure. So yeah, so I, I studied at NYU Stern, it's the undergrad program, the business school, and the first year out of college, I kind of fell into the trap of all of my classmates, everyone was going into investment banking and finance and trading.

And I went into private equity, a form of banking, and I was miserable there. It just wasn't, it wasn't me, you know, like, I saw the dollar signs, and it was alluring at first. But after a few months, you know, you get restless, and you realize, you know, this was, I was 21 years old, I realized that there's, there's more to life than that. And so, so I started working on, I had already been working on a business concept with a couple of friends of mine, but we had gotten it to a good point, and we entered it into NYU's business plan competition, which we fortunately ended up winning. We were the first undergraduates to win that competition. And that was my calling to leave the lucrative finance job and to go to $0 in income and to try to really build a successful startup.

And it took a while, there were so many lessons learned. I mean, just imagine, at 21 years old, you know, you haven't really been knocked, like punched in the face and knocked to the ground yet. So you think everything is like, is doable and easy. And so I got punched many times in the process and knocked to the ground a bunch of times. But with that said, there were also a lot of, a lot of successes and triumphs in the experience. We, we eventually figured out what we were doing with that company. It was a social network. And this was right when Facebook opened up beyond colleges into the general audience. And so what we had created was a network focused on what's happening in the real world in the future.

Where are your friends going? Where are people with similar interests to you going? And as well as looking at different venues that you, you enjoy visiting to be able to see any events that were taking place or people expected to go to them based on RSVPs to these different events. We partnered with Facebook and Meetup and Eventbrite and so on to be able to aggregate all of this information. Long story short, we were able to get to the point where we had hundreds of millions of people's social plans on our platform, more than almost a quarter billion people. And I was up for entrepreneur of the year at this consumer electronics show, the world's largest electronics show. I was a top five finalist for that, a whole bunch of different accolades.

And long story short, we, we were focused on building our user base, not on revenue, which was the playbook for all startups, social networks, and so on. Even, even some established companies publicly listed are still not even profitable. They're, they're still burning, burning money. Right. But yeah. So there was commonly known strategy. And the issue was that we were running low on capital and we had to either do a fundraise or be acquired, one or the other. At the time, we were already many years into the project. I don't recall off the top of my head, but maybe seven years, eight years in. And the question was, do we go for acquisition or fundraise? And we, along with our board decided to go for acquisition because there was interest from big players like Facebook and Google and others that I had calls with.

And they were, they were, you know, they were, you know, they were, you know, shopping around. Now, ultimately, there was another company based in Asia that was the most aggressive pursuing us. And Facebook and Google ended up stepping away from the, from the conversations. This company in Asia, very large company, said they wanted to acquire us. We did the due diligence phase where we shared, we opened up our books. We showed them everything and, um, and about four months into the process, it was taking longer than expected. Uh, I remember pointedly, it was right after hurricane Sandy. I was living in New York city. My apartment building got flooded. The basement did. So, uh, the city ordered us out.

So I lost my apartment. Uh, I was in Florida staying at a family member's home. And I had a phone call with this company where they said, thank you for sharing everything that you have. We have decided that we're going to try to build our own version of hot list. Uh, we will check back in with you in a year to see how things are going. And it hit me. I mean, talk about being knocked to the ground. This, this was like hitting me like a 10 ton brick. It was literally them just mining us for information, uh, only for them to then copy us and to leave us out to dry. And we had no capital left to be able to pay our employees. Uh, we had to shut down the business and immediately imploded. Uh, we tried to raise money from our current investors at that point, but it was too difficult to do.

Um, everything fell apart very quickly. Um, and then to the point of losing my apartment, when I eventually made it back, I found that my apartment was looted. Um, I, all of my, my valuables were, were stolen from the apartment and I went from being in, in the press and newspaper for my startup to being in it because I was robbed and, and, you know, down to basically no, no savings, no assets, nothing. Um, so it was a real, real test of my self-identity and, and my, my endurance and perseverance and so on, um, to say the least. I was going to say, I mean, and, and, and I read a part, I mean, you kind of, I mean, and who wouldn't go into about it a bit of depression after that. Right. How hard did it hit you from a just life standpoint?

Did it stop you in your tracks? And walk me through kind of once that final, I mean, you got hit a couple of times there and now you're, you're like, shit. I know for me, a couple of times in my life when I've been punched right in the mouth, it's, it takes a while. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer than others, but there's always that point of, oh my God, what do I do? And then you make a decision to keep moving forward. Could you talk us through that? Cause I think that's where a lot of people get stuck. I go back to what I learned a while back where people, there's two types of people. One is life happens to them. And then the other is life, life happens for them. Right. And to them, it's like, oh, all this, why did all this happen to me?

What was me? Like the Nancy Kerrigan, like why me? Right. I mean, the reason when she got hit by her, you know, by Tanya Harding, I don't think that ruined her career. I think what ruined her career was literally when the words came out of her mouth. Why me? Because then it was like, like everybody had sympathy for you, but now you made it. Like, oh, poor you, as opposed to I'm going to go get this. So where was, where was your head at when all this stuff came crashing down on you? I mean, you'd already been through adversity before. So it's not like this was brand new to you, but was there a moment where you questioned a lot of what you were doing and whether you were going to be able to move forward?

Yeah, great, great, great question. So, you know, the very first thing, the first thing to note is that a lot of my self-identity was tied up in the company. It was so many years of work. It was it was every waking and most of my sleeping hours thinking about the company. I would wake up with dreams about the company. Right. So and whenever I would visit family or I would bump into like a high school friend while back in my hometown, everyone would say, like, how's how's hot list? Or I saw you on the news or I saw you opening NASDAQ like, wow. And then all of a sudden they would some of them would still ask the question, not knowing what had happened. And I would have to then say, actually, the company has shut down, which was painful enough on its own.

I've since learned that it's really just ego. And, you know, I should get over that. But but yeah, my ego was was was was drowned. It wasn't simply bruised. It was drowned. And so I hit the ground running, which in retrospect probably wasn't the best thing to do. I hit the ground running in the sense that I started another company immediately. OK, and I probably should have taken some time to, you know, mourn the loss, so to speak, and to self-reflect, because I went into this other company just to too aggressively, too quickly. And and then all of a sudden the depression did hit. And that that depression wasn't it's an atypical form of depression. It's not the depression that most people think of things like suicidal ideation and so on.

This was more of what's known as anhedonia. So when you're anhedonia, you you lack motivation, you you don't care to do things. And that extended beyond business. This included spending time with friends or going out or going on a date or something. Right. Like I just felt like. Blah, like, why not just sit at home by myself and do nothing? I had no desire to go out and do anything to start the business, nothing. And so I actually started there is there is a series of serendipitous things that led me to we don't have the time to go over them, but it led me to reading the work of this spiritualist who was from India named Jiddu Krishnamurti. He, he, he, you know, it's not a religion or anything.

It's just like perspective on life. And when reading, he didn't write a book, but there are books published of his speeches. And he, he, one of, one of the biggest things that I took from it was questioning everything, questioning all of your preconceived perspectives and notions and beliefs in life. And, and, and I started questioning, like, why was I an entrepreneur in the first place? Or why was my identity so wrapped up in the business? Or what does success mean to me? What is success? Is it financial success or are there other forms of success? Um, even other questions like what is love? What is true, actual enduring love? Is, is love selfishness, which oftentimes in today's relationships, or I shouldn't even say today throughout history, relationships are selfishness, right?

It's about like, what can you bring to me versus the idea of selfless love, which was embodied in, in my mother, her, her selfless love that she had, uh, for me and my brother was unlike any, any love I've ever seen or witnessed in my life where she would do anything, absolutely anything for us, no matter what happened, no matter how we treated her. Uh, that was real true love. And so reading this work and reflecting, it really became transformative. I started to peel back the layers of the onion, if you will, of my, of who I am and, and the way I view the world and view myself and view others and really got down to the more simple, simple, like first principles or, or, or at least as close to first principles as possible related to life and my life and what I wanted from it.

Uh, I, I would constantly ask myself the question, why much like a child does, right? You know, the annoying kid who's like, why? And then you answer and then they're like, but why I was actually doing that to myself about like, well, why do I care what this person thinks of me? Okay. But why do I actually, you know, and I would keep going down until I eventually got to the answer, which was that like, you know, something, something, maybe, maybe it's related to, uh, the desire to be loved or for self-preservation or for one thing or another. But once I got to that, like foundational element, it, it disintegrated the feeling in the first place. Like I was freed from it almost like meditation can do when you, when you meditate on something, it can oftentimes just dissipate.

It disappears. So, um, that's a long way of, of, uh, of, of, of addressing your question. Was there a moment you said you, you, you had devastated, but then immediately jumped into starting a new startup. Did you hit a wall that, that made you basically realize that not, you know, you said then you were just, didn't want to do anything, right? Uh, go out to dates or anything like that. Was that a, was that a gradual thing with this new business that you had started? And were you just basically trying to hide? Look, and the reason I'm asking is because I think a lot of people don't deal with grief. Um, they keep themselves busy to deal with grief and then it manifests itself later on and they might not even know.

And I'll give you, you know, my, my mom, for instance, my dad passed away about a year and a half ago and she been married to him for 55 years. She knew nothing other than being with him. And she, I could tell she immediately flipped into, I need to sell this house. I need to get out of here and I need to start another stage in my life. So she, I mean, um, I mean, without grieving a ton, we grieved, but without grieving a ton, she cleaned up the house. She packed everything up. She did the estate sales. She sold the house. She moved to California. She got set up there and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it was like, and it was go, go, go, go, go. And I think everybody was like, whoa, what are you doing?

And she's like, nope, I'm just. And I think she was really trying to keep herself busy, not to deal with the dealing with the actual grief. And now it's starting to manifest itself in some other ways. And so I'm wondering for you, was it a, holy shit, I, I need to do something about this. Or was it just kind of a gradual, like something's not right here. And I need to, I need to, I need to refocus or stop keeping myself busy and start looking internally here. Yeah, I, so I, I think I, I jumped straight into starting the new business because I, I still had this, this, you know, I don't know, this desire for the, the quote unquote success and feeling like there's a failure. Well, let me immediately get back on my feet to prove to myself and others that I can, I can make it work.

I can build a successful venture. And, uh, um, it's almost like, you know, the, the analogy would be you, you break up with your girlfriend and instead of like taking some time for yourself, you immediately like date someone else, right. Which oftentimes people do is very similar. And so, uh, I, I think, yes, you're, you're right in the, in the sense that I should have spent more time actually in, you know, uh, experiencing, internalizing, grieving for, for, uh, what had happened. Uh, and how did it hit me? Yeah, it, it, it, it, it kind of, it did kind of hit me suddenly because, um, the new business I was working on, uh, it was doing well, but it wasn't, it wasn't scaling the way that I was hoping that it would.

And, and, and as I was starting to think about it, um, I, I was, I was allergic to raising third party money, like, like venture capital or anything. I, I, because I had felt like I had failed these people with my last venture. So I avoided it. And so this was more of like, just like, uh, uh, uh, in, in-house friends and family kind of bootstraps venture. And I was able, I was making money from it, but, um, you know, deep down, I ultimately wanted to make this into a very big business. And, uh, when I was realizing that it wouldn't scale in the way that, that I was hoping that it would, then I started to, uh, think like, what am I doing? Uh, and you know, it kind of stopped me in my tracks and that, and that's when I became aware of, that's when I became depressed and aware of the need to start like looking internally.

Did you reach out for help? Um, because the stigma is still out there of mental health and therapy and depression and so many people still try to deal with it themselves and they don't reach out to people around them. For you, was it, um, when you realized that depression was the issue in a lot of ways, did you try to handle that yourself? Did you reach out to people? What was the process there for you to, to start the journey of realizing that this, this, you needed help? Uh, no, I, I didn't reach out to people. Um, I, I think, you know, the, I think this is a common issue for men is just the, the, uh, expectation that you, you, you rough it out, you do it yourself, you know? And, uh, and I think it's, it's also probably beyond just like societal expectations.

It's probably also partly a male thinking pattern of, of like the way we are is like, like do it yourself, right? Like look at, look at us with a hammer and nails, right? Like we like to do things ourselves, right? And so, uh, we don't like asking for help. And so, no, I didn't ask for help, at least from friends and family. There did come a point where, um, I did book, um, an appointment with a psychologist and I had, uh, two sessions with the person. And then I found myself enjoying talking to the person, um, and sharing what, what I was feeling and my thoughts and so on. But I also, I, it, the, the relationship lacked any feedback. I was hoping I would get advice and feedback and tips and so on, but it was really more like just asking a couple of probing questions and they answer it.

But I wasn't really progressing from it. The real thing that made me progress was, was literally like the internal, uh, like questioning, like reading what I was, uh, which gave me just the insights or tools for me to then try to address it myself back to the point of, you know, doing everything ourselves. Um, yeah, so, and so with that, and let's kind of transition to the health, um, you know, we'll talk about body health and, and a lot of the stuff that you're working on now, as far as biological causes, causes of aging. But there's, there's some positive mental health practices that you've developed, uh, as part of this. What, what are some of the, outside of asking why quite a bit of why these things are important to you?

And what are some of the other positive, um, health practices that you've realized can make a difference for not just you, but for other people? So one thing I really got into at the time and still am to a lesser degree, but, um, still am into is meditation. So, um, you know, it's, it's, it's like, you know, the, the, the cool new age thing to do. Everyone's talking about it, but there really is something to it, right? It's been around for thousands of years for good reason. Uh, when, when you quiet your mind and you just observe, uh, your, your, your self, uh, or you simply, you can, you can observe one single thing. You can observe how your, your body feels like going from your head down to your toes.

You can observe your thoughts so you don't push your thoughts away, but as they come in, you notice that it's there. And then you try to like a cloud, let it pass. Uh, there are many different ways to, to meditate. But what I found is by doing it, I'm far more aware of like self-aware and aware of how I'm feeling and, um, whether that be physically or mentally or emotionally, uh, I'm, I'm far more in control of my emotions. And I don't mean that in the sense of control, like, you know, uh, the typical sense of like grabbing the emotion or something, right? Like the aggressive idea of control. I mean it in a more passive way, like it just naturally leads you to being more in control because your, your presence, your self aware, your presence, when things happen, you can almost step away from the situation and observe it happening from a third party perspective, uh, which then gives you the ability to really behave the way, uh, or closer to the way that, that you, you think you should.

In that situation, it's, it's, it's an amazing set of, uh, skills or capabilities that, that if you meditate for a while, you, you can, you can eventually attain. Uh, another thing is, you know, on the theme of health, I would say just the importance of how, how holistic health is. So psychological health and, uh, feeling good and avoiding depression, um, as just one example is also impacted by the foods that you eat, the supplements that you take, the activity that you engage in, uh, whether that be physical activity or lack thereof, um, whether you're drinking or not drinking, you know, all of these different things. They all interact with each other and they impact your physical health, your biological health, your emotional wellbeing, and so on.

So it's, it, what I found is that if I can be, uh, disciplines with the foods I eat and my exercise routine and making sure I get to bed at a certain time, even if I'm tempted to stay up, uh, and so on, uh, that it just puts me in so much better of a psychological place. It makes me more effective at my job. I, my, I'm, I'm sharper. Uh, I have more endurance to work longer. I, um, am, uh, my memory and recall is better. My mood is better. I treat everyone better, right? Like, so there, there are all of these cascading beneficial effects. Uh, if you, if you focus on your health in a holistic way. What's up everybody. I know you're enjoying this conversation. John does a great job with genuine curiosity on these episodes and our guests consistently bring the heat.

We want to take a moment here and let you know that you've got an opportunity, an opportunity to become better than you were yesterday. And you can do so by gaining access to all of JB sales content, all of their training tips, techniques, tactics, and takeaways can be yours for $1 a day. $365 for the year gets you annual access to everything, including our private Slack channel for members only, which you get access to all of us directly. A hundred percent of the time, 24 hours a day. And then at the same time, you're going to get access to our bi-weekly ask me anything sessions where you can bring real deals to the table and get the help that you need where you need it. This is very, very important.

Sales reps that invest in themselves are often found at the tops of their leaderboards. Join us today and get the help you need to become the seller that you deserve to be. That URL one more time is joinjbsales.com. Let's get back to the show with JB and our guests for this week. You've done a lot of experimenting with your health as far as different routines, different things to do. And, you know, so, and this is documented. You've been able to slow the pace of your aging by 37% in shaving 13.6 years off your biological age. So talk to me about, first of all, how does that get identified? I'm curious on that one. But then of the, and I know you got 10 biological causes of aging that you really focus on with what you're working on now.

But talk to me about some of that. Like how, first of all, how is that measured? And then let's back into what you do to get to that point. And, and, and let me ask real quick, how old are you right now, Chris? I'm 38. So I'm 46. So I think, so you've shaved, when it says you've shaved 13, so your body is basically 20 years old, like with that day, or 23 years old, give or take? Yeah, about biologically speaking. Well, let me, let me explain it for, for the audience to fully understand what we're talking about here. So there, there's a distinction between biological age and chronological age. Chronological age is how many times the earth has revolved around the sun. It's based on your birthday, right?

Then your biological age is how old effectively your body's biology is. So this correlates to, for example, mortality risk or risk of a chronic illness, right? It goes up exponentially as you're older. The chances that you die from a disease when you're 80 is exponentially higher than when you're 15, right? It makes sense. So if you are, let's just make it simple, 40 years old, chronologically, and you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, you might be biologically 45 years old. And by being 45 years old, it means your chances of sudden death or chronic illness is significantly higher than that of a 40-year-old. Now, on the other hand, if you follow the very healthy diet and healthy lifestyle, so on and so forth, at 40, you might be biologically 38 or 37.

And again, now that actually implies that you have a lower chance of anything going wrong compared to your peers who are 40 years old. So how do we actually measure this? Well, for a long time, scientists have been trying to figure this out. There have been different ways that we've attempted with, for example, blood tests and biomarkers and then using some formulas to try to approximate it. They haven't gone that far. Then next was telomere length. So your telomeres are the end caps of your chromosomes. They're what keep your DNA intact, kind of like the ends of shoelaces. And every time your cells divide, they get a little bit shorter. And so they are correlated with age. The older you are, the shorter they tend to be.

Now, there is correlation of your telomeres to your age, but it's not a strong definitive link. I'll give you an example. For me, my telomere age, I was shocked by this, and so was the lab. An executive from the lab told me this seemed like it was incorrect, so we reran your test three times and confirmed. My telomeres are that of a 7.8-year-old. Now, obviously, I don't look like Benjamin Button. I'm not an 8-year-old, right? So, yeah. So what does this actually mean? So now getting back to—we'll come back to that. Getting back to biological age, the best way that we have to measure it is what's known as an epigenetic test. So what is an epigenetic test? An epigenetic test looks at your epigenome.

Your epigenome—everyone knows what your genetics are, your genes, right? Epi, in Latin, is like a layer. It's a layer on top of your genetics. It's essentially which genes are turned on and off. Genes are like light switches, more like dimmer switches. And so if you imagine your genes being like a piano, the epigenome is like the player of that piano, deciding what music to play, which keys to strike. And as you age, certain genes turn on that ideally aren't on, like pro-inflammatory genes, and certain genes turn off that ideally wouldn't be turned off, like repair genes. And so there are these patterns that scientists have identified, and then using all different types of mathematical calculations, they're able to put together algorithms that essentially can tell you how old, biologically speaking, you are.

Now, early generation clocks were tuned based on your chronological age, so they base these formulas based on, like, well, let's look at a whole bunch of people who are 40 years old and see what their genes look like. Now, what they're based on, which is much more powerful, is mortality risk. So essentially, these tests are telling you how likely are you to die, as grim as that sounds. In fact, one of the clocks is called Grim Age, specifically looking into mortality risk. So getting back to my results in your question, when I took the test, I was in my mid-30s. So, sorry, not mid-30s, middle of 37s, right? So I was 37 and a half or a little bit under that. So there are multiple different clocks that you can run.

The one that I focus on is called the True Age clock. That one put me in at minus 13.6 years. That implies 37% slower aging in that I'm biologically that of a 23.6-year-old. There are other tests that I've also run, all of them averaging out to about 25 years old or so. There is another test, which is probably the most accurate of them all. It's called the Dunedin Pace clock. Now, this is a clock that was created as a collaboration between Columbia University and Duke University researchers. They looked at this cohort of people for 45 years, based out of New Zealand, got all of their biomarkers, epigenetics, and so on. And then any health issues, chronic diseases, deaths, and so on. And they have created what's known as a pace or rate of aging clock.

So rather than tell you what your biological age is, they tell you at this moment in time, how fast are you aging? Are you aging one year per chronological year, or are you aging slower or faster than that? For that, the result, and again, this is perhaps the most accurate test currently out there in all of the scientific space. It came back as minus 31%. So for every one chronological year, I'm aging 0.69. And that's right in line approximately with the 37% slower aging according to the other clock. It's like approximately, let's just say, around one-third slower is what these are implying. Now, I'll mention one other set of data. So, and by the way, all of us, I have a personal blog I launched three weeks ago.

It's brand new. It's called slowmyage.com. And there you can see my results. You can learn more about these clocks and the science behind them. One of the blog posts I write goes beyond just these clocks and then looks at real-world measures of health and how those correlate with age. For example, my VO2 max, which athletes will know about, the volume of oxygen that your body can take in and utilize at any given point in time. Pulse wave velocity. This is an indicator of arterial stiffness. The stiffer, the worse it is for your cardiovascular health. You want veins to be very pliable, right? So these come back. For example, my pulse wave velocity comes back as that of a 24-and-a-half-year-old.

My VO2 max of a above-average 25-year-old. My max heart rate is that of a 28-year-old. So triangulating with all of these different data points is pointing to the high likelihood that at least in terms of health and biological age, I'm somewhere in my mid-20s. Who wouldn't want to slow down aging? Do you think we're going to ever get to a point? I mean, look, we get older and older. Technology and medicine get better and better. But the quality of life is always the question, right? So where are we? What's the average life expectancy now, do you know, for like a male like you and I? Like what would the average life expectancy be? Is it in the 80s at this point? No, it's shorter than females.

I don't have the exact number off the top of my head. For the United States, I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of around 74 years old. Okay. It's in the mid-70s. In my 74 to 77, males shorter than females. Do you know the society that has the longest age range, if you will, as far as average death rate? I don't know specifically by country. I know Japan is quite high, but I don't know if there's another country that outdoes Japan. What I will say is that there's this concept known as blue zones or areas that have the highest levels of centenarians, people living beyond 100. And there are five of them. One is in Okinawa, Japan. Another is Sardinia, Italy. There's one in Greece. There's one in California.

There's one in Costa Rica. And so there are people, scientists, who have analyzed their diets, their lifestyles, their genetics, their epigenetics, so on and so forth. And there's a lot of insights that come from it. What I can tell you is that to live exceedingly long, like beyond 100 to 110, the longest lived person was a French lady, Jean-Clement. I believe she lived to 123. That is increasingly genetically influenced once you get to that extreme level. But for the rest of us, in terms of being able to live 80, 90, 100 without having any severe diseases and passing away peacefully in your sleep, that is predominantly lifestyle. About 75% lifestyle influenced and only about 20 to 25% genetically influenced.

Is there like a specific breakdown that you look at as far as diet versus mental health versus – or is it, like you said earlier, kind of that total holistic? There's so many different components to it. Because I could see, for instance, Japan, right? That makes sense to me because they are very – whether they meditate or whatever, but they seem very introspective as a culture, right, about – and purposeful about what they do and what they eat and all those other things. Whereas here, I'm actually surprised there's a place in California that has that blue zone right there. I'm surprised anywhere in the United States actually has a blue zone. So is there – from those 10 biological causes of aging that you focus on with Novos, how much of it is mental versus physical slash diet and exercise, if you will?

Great question. So first of all, the Californian centenarians are in this health-centric community. It's the only one where all of the other ones, there's like genetic similarities, right? Like if you live in Sardinia, there's like a lot of similar genes. In this case, it's actually not that way. And it's the only vegetarian – I believe it's actually even vegan community of them all. Everyone else eats fish and meats and animal products, but this one doesn't. But they're very focused on health. And I believe they're hypocaloric as well. So they're not eating as many calories as their body would otherwise like to be at like the homeostasis level. To your question about to what degree do each of these have an impact, there are – it's hard to say, right?

Because everyone is so unique and individual. And like for one person, being very stressed might have a greater impact on them than someone else based on different variables. Eating very healthy might, you know, offset some of those negatives. It is almost infinitely complex. And we can only come up with like, you know, population-based conclusions, which is quite different than an individual-based conclusion, right? What I would say is that I'm actually doing a webinar presentation, a live webinar in a couple of weeks on behalf of my company, Novos Labs. If you follow us on social, Novos Labs, on Instagram and Twitter, you'll find out about them and the date and so on. It's free to attend. But the topic of that is longevity lifestyle.

And I'm looking at the deck right now in front of me. And the things that we'll talk about are diet and supplements and how that can impact your healthspan and lifespan. Activity and exercise, sleep and recovery, which a lot of people neglect in modern society, psychology and relationships, physical environment, social habits. So all of these different things, social habits includes things like drinking alcohol and so on. Physical environment is like if you live in a polluted area or what your physical space is like and so on. All of these things have been found in studies to have an impact on your overall health and your rate of aging and your potential lifespan. If there was one thing that you would suggest the audience, and I look at myself, for instance, you know, I'm in okay shape.

I should go to the gym more often. I don't eat a lot. I pay attention. I get a little bit of high blood pressure. It's not crazy. But if there's one thing that people are like, you know what, health, mental, physical, all this health matters, and I'm starting to be more conscious of it. Because I realized, I don't know what it was for me when I was like, probably it was in my, when I was 40, if you will. I started oddly thinking about death a lot more than I ever had. And because I think my daughter and a few other things, and I think it is a healthy thing to think about it, not to be afraid of it, but you're more conscious of it. So for people who are kind of thinking about that, what are the steps that you would recommend short term, easy things that people can do in the short term to move in the direction of that health that will elongate their lives?

Is there a couple of tips that you would give people to say, like, as of today, you know, start thinking or doing these type of things instead? Sure. So on the webinar, I'm going to give a whole bunch of tips, but I'll give you a few of the, you know, more powerful ones right now. So from physical activity, 150 minutes per week of moderate physical activity is enough to extend your health span and lifespan by a significant margin. Not as much as if you were doing like high intensity training and, and really consistent with it, but 150 minutes a week. So what does that mean? Brisk walking, 20 minutes a day, seven days a week, you're almost at that 150 minute mark, right? So that, that's one thing to, to make sure that you're doing at the minimum.

Second thing for physical activity, ideally you do some weightlifting or even body weight exercises twice a week. So especially for your legs, one of the more common causes of death in, in later decades is, is as simple as falling, falling down the steps or, you know, falling while you're walking and no one's there to help you and you have a concussion and so on. So you really want to build up a strong foundation, um, in your legs, uh, so that when you get older and sarcopenia sets in, that's sarcopenia is when your body starts losing muscle mass. For women, it tends to happen at menopause or after menopause. Um, and for men, you know, similar ages, maybe a little bit later, uh, you want to make sure you have like, you know, a tree trunk that is then getting smaller and smaller rather than a twig that's getting smaller and smaller.

Right. Because you eventually skip leg day at the gym. Cause some guy's huge up top, but he's got twigs of legs. It's like, dude, you know, do it. Do some thigh work. Right, right, right. So, so you could do like body weight squats, for example, you could just, you know, stand up and then get as close to the ground as you're comfortable. And then, uh, stand back up again, you know, 20 reps, start with, then 30, then 40, then 50. Eventually you're going to really start seeing the muscle. You're going to build it up. You could do it while watching TV. You do it while on a zoom call. You put, you just hide the video, right? There's so many different ways or times that you can find yourself doing these things.

So, so that's physical, uh, in terms of diet, I would say, uh, one of the most important things to consider is your eating window, the time in which you're eating. And there's a, uh, a researcher at, uh, the Salk Institute in California named Dr. Sachin Panda, who's done a lot of research on, on, uh, your, uh, chronotypes and, uh, and diet and the impact of eating at different hours of the day and so on. And what's essentially found is that the shorter, the, the smaller the eating window that you can make, the better it is for your overall health. Studies have found that, for example, two people can eat the same exact foods, but if you eat in a smaller period of time, it can have a significantly better health, health outcome, um, in terms of cardiovascular risk, so on and so forth.

You mean eating faster or just? No, sorry. Yes. Good question. Uh, I should be more clear about this in terms of the hours of the day in which you're eating. So for example, um, I, I do, uh, this is called time restricted eating. So I only eat between the hours of either 12 to 8 PM or sometimes 2 PM to 8 PM. So I don't have breakfast, uh, despite what people say. No, it's, you don't have to have breakfast, right? Um, you know, when you break your fast, that's breakfast. So my lunch is my breakfast. Uh, so, so yeah, you, if you eat between 12 and 8 PM, for example, that would be known as a 16, eight time restricted, uh, eating window. So 16 hours of fasting, not eating, and then eight hour window in which you do eat.

That will go a very long way at the least. Make sure it's 12 hours at the least, right? So if you wake up at 9 AM finished by 9 PM, that is absolutely essential. Now, uh, ideally you actually shorten it more like eight hours or six hours. Like I said, to that point, stop eating three hours before bed. You don't want to go to sleep with a, with a full stomach. It's going to, uh, impact your ability to sleep. You might not notice it. You might think you're sleeping well, but you're not going to sleep nearly as well as if you have a three hour, um, period before bed at the least make it two hours. If you can't go three hours in terms of, um, calories, try more days than not to be a little bit hypocaloric.

So in other words, fewer calories than your body needs, right? So if your body based on your activity and your basal metabolic rate, you can find calculators online based on your age and body weight, what your basal metabolic rate is. That's how many calories you burn without activity. So if you add activity to that, uh, which you can track your calories burned with things like the Apple watch or the aura ring, or so many other devices nowadays, even your iPhone can, if you're keeping it in your pocket, let's just say that adds up to 3000 calories for the day, try to get by with 2,900 or 2,800, and then maybe once or twice a week on the weekends, you're going out and you're going above that.

Okay. That's fine. Once in a while to be what's called hypercaloric, but for the most part, try to be either equal to or slightly below the calories that your body needs. Um, and then of course, in terms of the foods, avoid sugar, avoid processed foods, avoid, um, the starchy carbs that turn into sugar very easily. Um, try to have as many vegetables as possible, uh, mushrooms, beans, um, fatty fish, like salmon, uh, minimize the red meat. It's okay to occasionally indulge, but don't make it a regular staple of your diet. Yeah. Those are, those are the main things for, for a diet. Happy to go into other things like psychology and so on, if you care, but those for activity and diet, which are like the staples for most people, um, that they need the most help with, I would say those are.

And I think those are the realistic ones too, right? Cause there's one thing about, you know, being woken up. That's what I'm always trying to prevent is, is being forced to all of a sudden get healthy. Right. I've seen a lot of my friends who have just ignored their health for years and they've had some major issue pop up and it's like, okay, now I have to basically change my entire lifestyle lifestyle because now, you know, I have type two diabetes. I have, you know, I had a heart attack. I had whatever that is. And that is, is not a fun transition to make. I mean, it's a, it's an absolute transition you have to make, but it's better to make kind of these micro transitions as you go so that you're, you're not completely changing your lifestyle.

You're, you're adjusting your lifestyle in a lot of ways. Exactly. You probably have heard about this, but I think it's very powerful. Like the idea of, if you can't bring yourself to like do a workout, at least promise to yourself, commit yourself to walking to the gym, for example, right. Or driving to the gym, whatever it is. And commit to doing one single set in the gym. Just one set, right. Instead of bench press, whatever it is, what you'll find is you do that one single set and you're like, Hey, you know what? It's not that bad to do two sets. Right. But as long as you like for you to set the goal of going to the gym and working out for an hour each day, that's intimidating. It's also more likely that you're going to say compared to sitting on the couch, I'd rather sit on the couch rather than spending an hour at the gym.

But if it's like, Oh, okay. All I'm committing to is driving to the gym and doing one set and then leaving. That's a 20 minute activity. That's actually more doable compared to sitting on the couch. Okay. I'll do it. But then once you're there, you find yourself doing more. And so you just have to get yourself psychologically to the point of initiating, starting the difficult task. And then you're far more likely to compare. Have you read the book Atomic Habits? There's a book about atomic habits and it's about like, don't try to change everything about what you're doing. Just do something small every day, but do it every day. To your point, get up and do a couple of bench presses, whatever it is, a couple of sit-ups.

It doesn't matter, but do it every day because then it turns into a habit. And once it turns into a habit, then all of a sudden you don't even have to think about it. Right. And so a lot of it is like these little micro, they call them atomic habits, these little mini things that can get you moving in the right direction, which is exactly what that is. Right. And something I'd also say that I found to be valuable is it's kind of in the same realm as meditation, but it's the idea of, of like integrating, um, your observations into your consciousness. I don't know if there's a term for an official term for this, but the idea is that if you observe yourself and how you feel or, um, you know, how you react to situations and so on, like if you observe yourself and then make a conscious point to like save it in your memory, so to speak, um, then you're far more likely to maintain it.

Well, I'll give you a specific example. If you find that eating healthy and going to the gym three days a week, that your mood is better, that you have more energy, that you're more productive at work, uh, that you're more optimistic instead of pessimistic, so on and so forth. If you take the time to sit down and just observe these changes, the, the benefits that these are, these things are bringing to you, um, and you make a point to remember it, you're more likely to continue with, with that lifestyle and to not let it slip. Because I, at least for me, I start to think, well, it would be tempting to go out and, you know, have a bottle of wine with my friends tonight or to have that, you know, dessert or to stay up really late, whatever it is.

Not to say I don't ever indulge. Sometimes I do, but like, um, I, I always weigh it in my head. Like, well, but do I want to feel groggy in the morning? Do I want to not be able to go for a nice run on the beach? Do I want to feel tired at 7 PM tomorrow instead of being energized throughout the day? Well, that wine is not nearly as appealing to me now as it was before. I just took five seconds to contemplate that. And then that completely changed my course of action and, and my success for the next day. I think, uh, to your point, there's a lot of mental and physical aspects of, uh, of aging and aging in a way that, uh, it's the way you want to versus the way you're forced to. I think a lot of us get scared about what that end of life is.

I used to make the joke of when I was ever doing anything unhealthy, um, people say, oh, that takes five years off your life is like, yeah, those five years are going to suck anyways. But now I'm like, nah, I think I want those five years, but I want those five years to be healthy years. Right. And, and I think, like I said, there's a point in your life, everybody's life, you wake up and you're, you start paying attention a little bit more. And, uh, hopefully this conversation got people to pay attention a little bit more. So Chris, where, uh, where can we send people? Where, where do you want people to find out more about you? I know we talked about your blog and your website and you got, uh, Novos and you got the webinar coming up here.

So what's the best way for people to learn more about you? Sure. So, uh, we didn't really talk much about Novos, but very quickly, I'll just mention that Novos, we are a consumer biotech company that's focused on longevity. Uh, so essentially to, uh, be younger for longer is what we, what, what our tagline is. So, um, we, we emphasize, or we focus on the scientific causes of aging, and then we create patent pending formulations along with our team of scientists from Harvard, MIT, the Salk Institute. These are world renowned scientists, uh, who, uh, help us to formulate these, these products, uh, to slow down the aging process. Essentially, uh, we'll also be releasing soon some, some tests for you to be able to track your biological age.

And we've got, uh, a blog with more than a hundred articles scientifically referenced, but, and so on. So that website is novoslabs.com. Uh, you can find everything there. We have Novos labs on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as well. And then, as I mentioned before, personally, I have slowmyage.com, um, and I'm slow my age on Twitter and on, uh, Instagram as well. Perfect. Awesome, Chris. Well, it's been a real pleasure speaking with you and I'm, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to apply some of those things that you talked about a little bit and do a little bit more reading on your blog so I can get some better ideas on how I can slow down a little bit because nothing at 46, I, I would love to be 36, uh, biologically, but, uh, I'm feeling a little bit older every day.

So I want to try to slow that down as much as possible. I appreciate you coming on my friend. Of course, we, we have an ebook on the Novos lab site, um, which is a good overview. It's a simple to read and you can get a good idea. You'll know more than your medical doctor about aging. If you read that ebook. Perfect. Perfect. Well, everybody go check that out. And look, I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Um, like I say all the time, let's go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day went or how bad you think it's going, if you make somebody smile today, you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much for listening and I'll see you on the other side.

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