#172 Chris Mirabile – How This Founder is Reversing Ageing Forever

There were multiple times where I didn't know if I could make payroll for the next month , which is incredibly stressful , especially when you have employees who are older than you , with children and families and they're depending on you . Psychological stress is found to be a contributor to aging and we've always known this .

It increases the likelihood for gray hairs and it's been scientifically proven out that that actually does happen .

, let's kick off man . So , as I said before we started recording , I came across your content for longevity and then , the closer I went into it , I realized that you had done so much stuff in your career to this point and you've also had so many like knockbacks and so many challenges and everything .

But I feel like that a lot of those challenges has made you the man that you are today and put you on the mission that you are on today as a result . So how do you think those like events have set you up for where you are right now ?

But it began when I was a teenager , so I was already into fitness and health .

I was exercising since I was 12 years old , like doing pull-ups and push-ups and so on , and then , when I was 16 years old , I suddenly , while in New York City , started to feel dizzy and nauseous and the next thing I knew I woke up on the floor with blood all over my shirt .

It turned out I had had a seizure and severed my tongue and that was caused by a brain tumor , and so I was rushed to the hospital . They did the CAT scan , they discovered it , and it was a journey to , first of all , thank God . Obviously I was cured of that brain tumor .

That's how I'm here today but it was a very difficult experience , especially after being cured , just like reflecting on the experience and understanding how close I came to death and how fragile life is , which most 16-year-olds are not really thinking . Life is fragile , right , but I experienced it firsthand , and that planted the seed for me .

First of all , I never wanted to be in that situation again , laying in a hospital bed wondering if I would wake up the next day , and I wanted to do everything I could to prevent myself from being in that situation again . And so I continued to focus on health . But now my interest in health had evolved from one that was purely superficial .

Admittedly , when I was 12 , 13 years old , I just wanted to be attractive to the girls in school and play sports well .

But now , for the first time , I was thinking of health in its truest sense , like biology and avoidance of disease , and ever since then , I've really been passionate about understanding what can cause disease and how to optimize myself to be the best version of myself that I can be today , while also not short changing myself in the long term .

It was 23 and me they don't go so far into your genome but then I was able to export that data into other platforms that could then look at the SNPs , the single nucleotide polymorphisms , as they're called . So which genes are , are are behaving behaving differently , let's say , than than typical .

And I noticed that I did have a couple of genes that increased the likelihood for me to have a brain tumor , but it was only , say , a 10% increase . So instead of one in 1000 , maybe it was one in 900 , right , so it didn't fully explain it . It could have been by random chance . It could have been eating sweets when I was a kid .

I had a , you know , sugar habit when I was . When I was a kid . I mean , I don't know , I can't , I can't say definitively , but it was enough for me to feel satisfied that I had at least a partial answer , more so than my medical doctor told me .

My neurologist and my neurosurgeon both said it was a you know coincidence there's , you know the chances of you getting another . One is equal to anyone in the population getting one . Don't worry about it . But that wasn't enough for me .

So that's when I researched and found more than what the doctors told me , and that was enough for me to at least set my mind at ease .

And so , by myself , without a spot , at like 9pm while my parents are in bed watching TV , they hear a loud crash because I couldn't get the the , the bar , off of my chest and I had to throw it off of me and I ripped a hole through the wall in my basement , right .

So so that was me trying to get back to the normal swing of things quicker than than I normally would have . On the other hand , I had played American football in high school and I couldn't play anymore .

I found myself writing poems on the weekend , like on a Friday night , when my friends , you know , would go out and , you know , maybe experiment with beer or , you know , go to a party or something like that . I was finding myself like writing poems in journal entries and so on , reflecting on my life .

That's a side of me that I never saw in myself prior to the experience , but I welcomed it . You know it was a highly transformative experience . I consider having had a brain tumor to be a blessing . I would never want to have one again and I would never wish one on anyone .

But I made the conscious decision when you know I was going through the experience and afterwards , to focus on everything I could derive from the experience , how it could bring me to a better place , and , rather than playing the victim card and saying why me ? And look at all these bad things that have happened , instead try to find all of the positive things .

Because if you did have a lifestyle whereby none of these events happened to you , or even just like an injury or whatnot , you could probably end up in a position that you don't want to be in because you potentially could coast your life .

So the reason why I've got a lot of similarities between your story and how you've been moving on and on and on is because I've had a few career-ending injuries as well , which is in rugby , which is quite similar to American football , which forced me to move into education , which I had no background in , and then into entrepreneurship from there .

So I feel like for you it was like American football was like a vehicle and fitness , from a static perspective , was a vehicle , and then you moved into a new vehicle which is like education , understanding the brain , understanding what's happening . So for you it's more like a personality trait that you want to be moving forward in that aspect .

So it must have been quite difficult for you mentally to have to walk away from the things you enjoyed as a kid . Is that true ?

So I had learned about , after recovering from the tumor , about this competition that the United States Marine Corps hosts called the National Physical Fitness Championships for high school students , and that inspired me , and so I set a goal for myself , basically approximately speaking I can't remember exact dates , but approximately one year I set out from recovering from

the brain tumor to qualify for the National Championships , which I did . It was hosted at the Marine Corps barracks in San Diego , california , and I was able to place nationally for physical fitness . I worked my ass off as hard as I could to be able to qualify for it and to be able to place in it , and so I found motivation through it .

Yes , it was very frustrating at first that I couldn't exercise and do the things I wanted to do , but then , as soon as I was able to , that gave me that much more motivation to actually achieve a specific goal , whereas prior to that it was just like try to win a race and track . This was something much bigger than that .

That that's the value in all this , is the fact that you're able to learn from it and , of course , in the event , it's horrific , but that wasn't your only really big life event , was it Like from there ? So you came out of there , you were doing a lot of athletics , a lot of track , and then you went on to build your first company .

Now talk me through even how you built it . Like what was the idea there ? Because you were in university and it was a case competition , if I'm correct .

You could only sign up if you were a college student at an approved school , but they were opening up for the general population to be able to access it , and there were a lot of students who were saying we want something that's exclusive to us . Again .

At the same time , a flaw that we saw within Facebook was that it was all virtual and we believed in the ability or the power to socialize in the real world , and so we designed a social network that was again college exclusive , focused on enabling people to see , get a peek into , what's happening around them in the real world .

So , in other words , events and venues , who's going where . You could follow specific friends of yours and see what they're up to . Or you could follow a specific venue you love to see who's expected to go there , any events that might be hosted at that venue , or maybe you have an interest in something , say rugby .

You could see all of the rugby events that are happening nearby . And the cool thing is that we ended up eventually partnering with Facebook to be able to gather tons of info from their API , to the point where we scaled to over 220 million people's social plans and we were able to show you anywhere in the world practically what was happening there .

And we could give you a virtual peek through the window of a venue and show you like what the crowd is expected to look , like the guy to girl ratio , so on and so forth .

So you could be traveling to , say , milan , italy , and have no idea where to go , what to do , and our tool , hot List , what it was called , would enable you to get an idea of what you might want to do for yourself and improve your social life essentially .

And so we launched this , and what you were talking about is we won NYU Stern's business plan competition . By the time , I was one year out of college and I was working in private equity banking , which was not for me , but I was one year into it . We won the competition and I handed in my resignation letter and somewhat smugly walked out .

I worked across the street from the Ferrari dealership on Park Avenue and I was looking at the cars I was like you're going to be mine very soon and that did not happen . I had failures that occurred after that , and so definitely a lesson in being humble .

I wasted many years doing this , making it all up as a lot as I go , so I put everything together in a very seamless and easy to follow course for you guys to follow and just learn exactly how to do it .

So if you want to bypass a lot of the mess with your podcast , check out the links down below the podcast university and I will show you exactly how to launch and scale your own podcast . How did you scale to like 250 million users ? Just a small team , or did you have a big team at that point ?

We had a tremendous amount of data that we were processing and , as most social networks at the time , and even if one were to launch today we didn't focus on revenue at first . We focused on building up the user base , and so we were doing that the entire time and just burning through cash .

So the money that we raised was , you know , every month we were burning through it without any revenue coming in , and so eventually there came a point where we had an acquisition offer on the table .

We were talking to some big companies like Google and Facebook and others , but ultimately there's one company in Asia that wanted to acquire us and they put a number on the table .

We said , okay , yes , we'll take that , and we started the due diligence process , but all the while , we're burning capital , and they dragged it out so long that we got to the point where we couldn't afford to keep payroll going , which was a really rough experience for me personally , which you know we could talk about if you care to .

But the company essentially said thank you for all of the info you've shared with us . We're going to try to create our own version of hot list here in our local market and we'll check back in with you in about a year . And we didn't have the capital to keep the doors open and we had to shut the business down .

Hopefully , typically it doesn't end up that way , but that's always a possibility . Other thing is that they were based in Asia . We were based in the United States . It would be really rough , legally speaking , to try to sue them and , most importantly , we had no money . So what were we going to sue them with ?

Right , we didn't have the capital to hire a law firm .

Basically , we had gotten verbal commitments from investors to invest in our company and more than a million dollars would have been coming to us .

But at the time then Lehman Brothers defaulted and the great economic collapse began , so that money disappeared , and so then I had to go a couple of years just living off of the salary from that lucrative one year in private equity .

I just burned through my savings without making any money for a couple of years , and then eventually we were able so it was a long , extended timeframe Probably when we did shut down I don't know exactly when that was off the top of my head , but I would approximate it was probably when I was around 27 years old , so about six years .

You've had family challenges as well as well as going through this business opportunity , whereas for me , at 27 , you know , I'm still you're early into my entrepreneurial like career , I guess , to my degree , so I'm only onto , like , my first big business you know that I'm building . So that's where it's . The similarities are sorry .

The contrast is very interesting because for you , mentally , how did you , how did you endure some of those events ? Because , like you , may not have the tools to be able to deal with these as hardship , right , and it was at a point to whereby mental health for men or females was never discussed , right .

So how did you walk through these scenarios and , like , what did you even do in this scenario ?

Like you know , opening up NASDAQ and being plastered all over the digital billboards in Times Square in New York City is something that I got to experience and that was so motivating being , you know , interviewed by the top publications and you know them saying that we're , like , one of the top companies in the space , and so on very motivating .

But then tons of tons of experiences where you know , there are multiple times where I didn't know if I can make payroll for the next month , which is incredibly stressful , especially when you have employees who are older than you , with children and families , and you're , they're depending on you , and it's completely different .

It's not about , like , what will I be able to , you know , afford to live ? It's about these other people that are depending on you . So there are a lot of those ups and downs , but during that period , you just , you just really hold on to the ups and the vision , like what you're really there to accomplish , and that keeps you going .

Now , when it finally we did have to shut down , that was a very difficult experience , because not only was my ego and self identity invested in that , like whenever I would , for example , like visit my hometown and run into a friend from high school . They'd say oh , I saw you on the news with hot list , it's so happy for you , it's going so great .

And now someone might say that and I have to say , actually hot list is no longer , it's shut down . It's like acknowledging failure straight to them was was humbling , what else that ? Oh the ?

At the same time , hurricane Sandy hit New York City and so my apartment was near the South Street Seaport in New York City , for anyone who knows New York City and it was so the water rose and it hit my apartment building . My building was 52 stories tall , very tall building . The basement was a garage . So all of that garage got flooded .

The cars in it leaked gasoline and oil and the city , new York City , declared the building unfit for living . So I had to move out of the building at the same time that everything is going down with with hot list , and so I moved down to . My cousin had a vacation home in Florida .

I went down there by myself to live there for a little while while I was trying to figure out where I was going to live , and eventually they let me back into my apartment , and I find that my apartment was was robbed , so my most valuable possessions were taken , and so I went from being in the newspaper for my company to now being in the newspaper for

being the victim of natural disaster and crime and so on . It was not where I wanted to be and it was a really difficult experience where I ended up having to spent a lot of time like learning how to meditate , and that was very helpful for me . I started reading the works of this of all people is a coincidence , why even came across his work ?

But this Indian spiritualist named Jidu Krishnamurti , which long story short is his philosophy , is like essentially , question everything . Like question your values , question why you care about the things you care about , question what love really is to you and to those who say they love you .

Like there's a genuine , true love and then there is a self selfish love , right ? So all of these things I started questioning . It was almost like peeling the layers of an onion , getting closer and closer to my core of who I really am , and it was a multi year process , all the while I was trying to start another venture , but that that was .

That was ultimately how I got through . The experience was really trying , like focusing internally , trying to better understand myself and what I really want and care about .

And I know you built that next venture , which you said was probably , you know , a good and a bad thing at the time , but you never really settled right . And even the spirituality , even meditation that was probably around the time of Sam Harris was coming out with his app and it was kind of really getting .

It was it was getting a lot , of , a lot more engagement , I guess , and Tim Ferriss was talking about it around this time , 27 , 2007 , 2010 . But it feels like to me that you really keep moving forward , right , and what's your , what's your approach to that ? Like ? What's your advice there in terms of when people are facing these , these periods of difficulty ?

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If you envision who you are in five years from now , 10 years from now , 20 years from now , is your vision that you played the victim card and people feel bad for you and you get a few handouts here and there . Is that like your goal ? Is that who you see yourself being in five years or 20 years from now ? I never , ever , saw myself being that person .

The things that I really want , I need to earn . I need to work hard to achieve those things . And being a victim even if it's not for the sake of others doing things for me , even if it's just me feeling like the victim and it's in my own space

that I'm feeling that way when has that ever gotten me anywhere ? It's never gotten me anything right . It's only going to be a distraction . It's only going to take you further away from achieving your goals . So my philosophy is that if you fail , if you fall down , the best thing to do is not to sit there and cry about it .

It's to get back up on your feet and immediately take the next step .

What is the foundation for that ?

Like evolution wants diversity of the gene pool and then eventually for us to pass away so that there's adequate resources for the younger genes , the more diverse genes , to then be able to propagate , and so on and so forth . So that's a possibility . That's a part of the broader context of why do we age .

If we look at it from a biological perspective , there's what's known as the 12 mechanisms of aging or the 12 hallmarks of aging . But simply , this is essentially the 12 causes of aging , and one of those causes would be your epigenome . So your epigenome is what I just described .

So if you think of your genome , your genes this is what everyone knows at this point is what you inherit from your mother and father and these are essentially your traits . But your epigenome is which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off .

So if you think of your genes as being like the piano keys , your epigenome is like the piano player of those keys , and everyone has a different tune , but there are similarities to it and , as you age , that tune that you're playing certain keys that should be struck or not , and vice versa .

And so that is when your genes that should be triggered are not , or certain genes that shouldn't be triggered , are being triggered . And what does this lead to ? It can lead to , for example , cells within an organ thinking that there's something that they're not .

For example , you might suddenly grow like hair on your back that never existed there before , when you're much older , and that is your skin cell thinking that it should behave as a hair cell , and now , suddenly hairs is growing there , right .

So there are patterns to this and there are different ways to then look at these patterns and determine how old someone is biologically , which we can get into later if you care to . But there's 11 other biological causes of aging . The epigenome is only one of those 11 .

Some of them your audience might be familiar with , like , for example , your mitochondrial health , the power plants of ourselves that convert the food we eat into energy .

When you get older , you have fewer of them , and the ones that you do have don't function as efficiently anymore , and when you're not getting as much energy in a cell , that cell can't perform its function as well and it's not going to protect itself as well , and so on and so forth , which leads to another cause of aging , which is DNA damage .

And another cause of aging is telomere shortening , and telomeres protect the DNA at the ends of your chromosomes . If you have more damage of your DNA , your telomeres are going to shorten quicker because you need to copy your cell or replicate the cell more often because the cell is not behaving properly . So you get what I'm saying here .

Like all of these different biological causes of aging , they interact with each other . It's a complex web , a dynamic system where they all feed off of each other . And that gives you a hint or a clue into why I decided to start Novos in the way that I did , where we are the first company to address all 12 of the hallmarks of aging simultaneously .

Because the philosophy I had when I was starting was , if you think of aging as kind of like an old car with flat tires and rust and needs an oil change and so on , if you simply refill the tires , the car is not going to function the way that it should and something else is going to break very quickly .

But if you repair everything , even if not perfectly , but you repair it just good enough . Now the car can actually function and there's much lower chance that it's going to break . And if we think of breaking , that would be either disease or death essentially right in the analogy .

So that's the philosophy and that's ultimately , at least on the microscopic , literal sense , that is what is causing aging , these hallmarks of aging .

So , beyond the stuff that's going to happen to you , that is common between everyone , there's all these other factors that we can control , which is exactly what I want to get into in terms of , like , what are the different variables that we can do to make this more practical ? Right ?

And the biggest thing for me that , when I was observing you , is the fact that you , as the entrepreneur and as the founder , have reversed your aging , your biological age , about 13 years . So 39 years old you are , which is hilarious because you look younger to me and 26 biologically .

How much of an impact do you think things like entrepreneurship , building a business , distress , depression , payroll has on your aging ?

For example , when people have lower levels of stress , the melanin starts to be produced again , and so that single strand of hair can go from being brown to gray to brown again , based on levels of stress . Right , and that's happening internally as well . So , yes , stress , psychological stress , is going to accelerate the aging process .

So , but this is something that , before I even started Novos , I was putting a lot of thought into , because I did have failed startups , I did have a period of depression in my early 30s around 30 , 31 years old and I wanted to , before starting my next venture , just be like as well equipped as possible to weather any storm and to be as healthy as possible .

And the main thing that that came down to was mindset just having the right mindset going into all of this and we can talk about the mindset if you care to , but that was first and foremost and then also having very healthy habits and the self discipline to maintain those healthy habits .

So that would involve things that I'm sure at some point you'll like to talk about , related to like sleep and exercise routine and diet and alcohol use and so on . But by being strict with it and having the right mindset , I could create a business with far lower stress levels than I had experienced historically with other companies I had started .

I think you could interview any single employee of Novos and they will tell you it is , if not , the best job they've had . They are happier here than anywhere else . Just as we work very hard , we execute at the highest level like quality standards that we can , we're best in class . I have people on my team from SpaceX , from Apple , from Google , from Amazon .

Like these are top class people . But I've created a work culture that is very positive . It's very kind , we're very considerate of each other . We give each other the space that we need . People have unlimited vacation , but , of course , no one goes extreme with that . But it's just like a really , really healthy culture and that's really important to me .

Like I want my team to be psychologically healthy as well as physically healthy , like I want to , as a business , embody what we are selling to consumers .

We need to be the leaders in this and , to that point , one of my team members just found out yesterday this is just fresh in my mind that he qualified for this like rejuvenation Olympics leader board that exists somewhere on the internet about like the best biological age results out there .

We have multiple customers that are on that list , but one of my team members qualified for it , so next month he'll be added to that list of having one of the best biological ages . Most startup environments are highly stressful . He's not achieving that in a highly stressful environment .

Even though there's a lot of stressors , we know how to cope with them well and we have the right philosophy in the business .

It's the opposite of it and so that's the most extreme . But then if you're not getting that extreme , just the negative mindset , the negative psychological place that disrupts you hormonally . It disrupts , it increases your likelihood to get ill , for example , even things like viruses .

Your immune system down regulates , for example , spend a lot more time sleeping and in bed , but not productively sleeping . Overall that is going to accelerate your biological rate of aging , at least while in that place . But I don't want to . If someone who's listening is depressed , I don't want them to get even more depressed by hearing this .

I mean , I'm a case in point example of somebody who did go through a period of depression and I've come out the other end healthier than practically anyone else who has taken these biological age tests , at least according to the laboratory that runs them . So there are ways to actually fix what you may have broken or disrupted .

Keep in mind also I had the brain tumor . That's physical trauma . There are studies that have found that , for example , childhood trauma . They did this and they measured this in the form of , like , psychological trauma .

But physical trauma , of course , is going to bear a huge burden on the body as well , plus the psychological trauma of going through the experience . I went through that as well . Right , I went through the stressors of entrepreneurship and losing my business and so on , and yet I still had these results . So the point is that you can get past it .

So it's kind of like if you are feeling depressed or you have mental health disorders or you've had struggles with this , you can still work on the other components which will potentially bring down that negative actual outcome as well .

At the same point , as I mentioned before , I really admire the fact that you have very much of a holistic perspective , but it's very much driven off the fact that it's practical . So you're a healthy dude , you're very active , you're fit , you've like a moderate kind of body fat . You say you do a lot of strength training , a lot of walking .

How does that compare to people like Brian Johnson and have you looked at his work and what's your thoughts on what his approach is towards longevity ?

I think it's important for people to be aware that it's even possible to have an impact on your aging and to slow down the process of aging and maybe even someday in the future , to reverse aging , as we are doing , at least at an organ level , in living animals right now .

There's no reason to think that we wouldn't be able to one day do this in humans as well , so it's important for people to understand this . I think it's very empowering for someone to understand that they can accelerate or decelerate their aging based on many different variables , and he's bringing a lot of attention to that . So I appreciate that .

In terms of the approach he takes , I do have a concern that a lot of people might see it first of all as

being very extreme and something that they don't want to touch , but also they might then think that they need to go to extremes to achieve the results that he's achieving .

When you look at my results , many of the dimensions are comparable to his , and some of the more significant dimensions , like biological age , I have performed better than him on so the main like claim to fame , so to speak , of the reversal of biological age or the slowing of the pace of aging .

I have gotten better results than he has , and I haven't gone to the extremes . When I say extremes , what I mean specifically is , for example , extremely low body fat percentage , extremely low caloric intake , eating exactly the same foods practically every single day . Hormone therapies so testosterone replacement therapy .

Human growth hormone , even estrogen , so male hormones and female hormones . Blood transfusions with his son and receiving his son's blood . Multiple other things as well that I can't recall off the top of my head .

But I don't do any of those things and I don't think you need to do any of those things either to achieve the results that , or at least similar results to what I've been able to achieve . So I think it's great to get press .

It's like , as they say , it's like a sexy story , right , it's a sexy headline to say you know , billionaire spends $2 million a year taking blood transfusions from his son . Like people want to read about it . So he's playing that . He's playing the PR angle to it . But ultimately , is that really what you need for longevity ? No , it's much simpler than that .

It's much more achievable than that .

Do you think that there is a stigma now becoming attached to the fact that to increase longevity of your life , or to increase the longevity you need to sacrifice the quality of your life ?

It's not that simple , but it might be like 50% of the effort to get to 75% of the benefit . You know , you can get a very long way doing some quite simple things , and it's all going to then depend on who you are , what your personality type is and what your ultimate goal is . Right .

There is a period in my life where I was extremely , extremely strict with my lifestyle .

I wasn't going to extremes , experimenting with things that I considered to be risky , like TRT and HH and estrogens and blood transfusions and so on , but when it comes to like being extremely strict with the foods I ate and I never counted calories , but I , you know , with approximate and my workout routines and all of that stuff I was extremely strict .

I was also extremely single and now , with a girlfriend in my life who is from Italy and likes to , you know , enjoy her pasta and tiramisu and so on , like , come on , like .

Can you imagine me being in Venice for the holidays , for New Year's , we're in Venice and me saying , no , I need to eat like keto , and can't , you know , have the pasta or something like that ? Like , what kind of boyfriend would I be and am I experiencing life ? No way . So it's a balance . For me it's .

I can be extremely strict Sunday evening through Friday evening , and then Friday night and part of Saturday , maybe morning , some combination .

I'll still be so much strict , you know , for one or two of the meals in each of those days and then , like , maybe for dinner Friday night or dinner Saturday night , maybe I'll have a dessert , I'll share one with her , or maybe I'll have pizza or pasta or something like that . Now , this is much more strict than the average American .

Right , I'm in the probably top one or 2% of the average Americans for how strict I am . But compared to what you're seeing you know specifically , brian Johnson , since you brought them up with that I don't go nearly as extreme as that . I can live a life . I can enjoy myself and others can enjoy my company .

But just sticking on that point as well , because I'm quite similar to you as in I have a coach , high performance coach . I've been training and bodybuilding for 13 years . I've never really taken a break from it . You know I have a training plan , I have a nutrition plan to 95% of the week and then I would have like a salad or whatever .

Have something that's off plan , right . So , sticking on the point around the extreme side of things , are you tracking your biomarkers ? Like , is there something that you're continuously tracking ?

Like , for instance , brian Johnson would check red light therapy and he would be doing this like pretty much every day and he'd be doing either effects on his face and effects on his skin . Are you tracking that kind of level of detail or are you not ?

One is I have an aurora ring , I have the latest Apple watch , so I'm tracking everything from like sleep metrics across both of the devices , my activity levels , obviously , caloric expenditure , vo2 max , hrv , resting heart rate , so on and so forth . We are on our website at novoslabscom slash face age .

We have this facial aging AI tool where you can take a selfie and it tells you how young your face looks , and then skin health markers . So I'll test that like once , maybe once a month or something , just to see how I'm trending , making sure I get the same lighting conditions and I'm hydrated and so on . But I'm not like every single day .

I mean I have a full time job as a CEO , like I work basically from the moment I wake up I'm checking emails to the moment I'm in bed . I'm also checking emails Like it's nonstop , even on days off . I'm working , but I don't want it to come across in the wrong way . I'm not like overworking myself .

This is my passion , it's like what I enjoy doing , but it is still , nonetheless , continuous . There's not enough hours in the day for me , so between wanting to exercise , wanting to spend some time with my girlfriend and my dog and friends , and then working , obviously there's no additional time .

So I do like to track this stuff , but I do it a little bit more passively , where each day I'll check , like my metrics for my sleep , I'll check what my activity levels were towards the end of the day .

But part of the reason for this is also I really believe in the promise of AI and to be able to take years worth of data about my lifestyle and all of these different metrics and like the supplements I'm taking and so on , and then trying to find correlations and let AI be able to do some machine learning on my data set and then give me highly personalized ,

customized recommendations based on that .

You know a lot of people look at this stuff and they think it's extreme , right . But for me , and I think , oh , when you wear an Aura ring and you see six hours sleep , you have a bad mood during the day for work . But I think that's the wrong way to look at it . I think you should look at it as a guide . It's a perspective , right .

It's more like okay , I have been feeling tired . I've checked my Aura ring . I've only slept for six hours . My HRV is 40 . Maybe I should finish up work at 6pm versus going to 9pm , like I regularly do and like as an entrepreneur as well . You know I'm up at 5pm . We started recording at 7pm . I'm not finished tonight to like 9 .

Naturally , now I'll go to the gym pretty soon . I'll go walking in 35 degree sunlight . I'll get sun exposure , but it's kind of like using these things as a guide and approximate versus the be all and end up . It's kind of like tracking your workouts right , if you're not progressing as much as you did last week , you don't get sad about it .

You just look at the data and you just try to improve it . And I think that's where sometimes people can kind of feel like , oh , this is too much , and they view against that right . So again , there's thousands of areas to get into .

I'd love to get into the sticking on the skin for a second , because that's something that I don't see too much on your website about and nutrient deficiency . So when I went through one of your blogs which I thought was crazy , one of the micronutrients that people lack , so percentage less than estimate average requirement Vitamin D was 95.4% .

So how do you think about that in terms of like so one , the nutrient , and to the Defects of like skin , getting in the right sunlight , getting in sun exposure . How does this work together in terms of how do we manage it ? Because for me , to be honest you know I live in a tropical climate I'm probably doing more damage than good with my skin .

Well . So first of all , on the topic of skin , I haven't personally blogged on slowmyagecom that much about the topic , if at all , but on the Novos website we do have articles that cover the topic of skin and longevity . I Think you're referring to an article I published on slow my age .

The title is diet and nutrition how I extend my health , span lifespan and slow my aging . Yeah , and in there I talk about the NHANES study of 16,444 people , that it essentially found a high prevalence of inadequacies for multiple different micronutrients , and so vitamin D 95.4% of the population has an inadequacy for it , but there are others vitaminE 93.9% .

Potassium 97.6% .

And then the topic I dig into in this in this post is Specifically choline , which is considered the forgotten B vitamin , but 91.7% of the population was deficient or had an inadequacy in in choline , and choline is extremely important for neurotransmitters like acetylcholine , which are everything , deals with everything , from thinking to triggering or muscular function .

It prevents hepatic fat , so , like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease , it prevents it . So many different Reasons to make sure you have enough of it , specifically for vitamin D and skin concerns . So yes , vitamin D is produced from UV radiation . It can also be just taken in supplement form .

My philosophy on sunlight is that there is value to sunlight , like , for example , letting exposing your retinas to sunlight and looking in the distance . We'll keep your eyes healthy . So you know , when we're staring at screens all day long , we run the risk of Strengthening those muscles so much that , like then we we can't see things at a distance anymore .

Our vision declines , and so the UV radiation along with looking at things at a distance are actually the combination of the two are important for your Eye health . So I don't think that UV is all 100% bad .

It's just that With most things , the dose makes the poison and unfortunately , if you're in a tropical or I'm in a subtropical region right now in Florida you you can overdose quite quickly . So what do I personally do ? I always wear a facial sunblock . The moment I Wake up and wash my face , I put on a facial sunblock , full spectrum , at least SPF 30 .

Because if there's anything when it comes to like aging the most you know I don't know the most perceived form of aging is your facial aging , right , like , if your skin is like your .

Your chest skin is wrinkling a little bit no one's really gonna know this , especially when you have your shirt on , but your face is the first thing everyone sees and that's what most people are concerned about . So I always put on the facial sunblock . I supplement with vitamin D daily .

I take 5,000 , I use every Basically like five days a week , and then when I go out for runs , I do oftentimes do it like along the beach without a shirt on and I'm getting that UV radiation , but I'm not overdue , overdoing it . It's typically less than an hour that I'm out in the sun like that . I'm not wearing sunblock .

Admittedly , I'm not suggesting this for everyone , but for me . I'm adapted enough to the sun and I do have in my diet Choronoids Such as , you know , vitamin E a , staxanthin , zaxanthin , lutein . All of these different molecules are really good at protecting the skin from UV radiation .

So I Feel like it's a low risk that there's there's , you know , access damage being caused from less than an hour in the summer . I when I run that way a few days a week .

even on my body too . Right , I wouldn't necessarily be using low SPF even though I'm tanned . That's at the point . Right , it's a protection to skin which most people get wrong , right , they think they're tan , they don't need it , but maybe that's why they're looking so old so quickly .

Right , tell me about some of your research , about when you looked at outlived by Peter Tia I know you mentioned him in your in your research and the way he looks at things is Maybe focus on macronutrients from correct and outlive and he's looking at that kind of profile . How do you think a bit deeper than that and what's your perspective on that ?

So I want to say that first and foremost , and so to that point I'm kind of nitpicking on one very particular thing in that book that I perceived or saw differently than him . But for the most part , 95% of that book I agree with his perspectives .

This particular point is that when he talks about diet he basically Makes this general statement that you know , as long as you're not eating like the standard American diet and eating all these processed foods , like it doesn't matter what diet you follow , they're all going to be , you know , more or less equally good for you , and doesn't really talk at all about

the micronutrient side of things .

In my experience , both personally and with Family members , acquaintances , friends , people that I meet , micro nutrient deficiency is very common and it's a very common explanation for people having health issues that they're facing , whether that be like lackluster energy , poor sleep , poor physical performance , even things like low fertility or unable to be fertile , lack of

libido I mean you go down the list .

There's just so many different things that people complain about , particularly when they're in their 30s and older , that can actually be explained by an remedy , by supplementation or changing the diet to focus on specific micronutrients that you might not be getting an adequate amount of with your you know , generally healthy , random diet .

So I think , just in general medical doctors they they aren't . Their curriculum doesn't educate them on Micronutrients , much less diet . It's only a few hours out of their entire curriculum . It's practically nothing , and they just underestimate the impact that food it can be medicine .

It literally can change how your , your body and your organs function , even things like cancer and cardiovascular disease . And Then you go down the list of diseases of aging and their prevalence and likelihood is going to increase if you are Chronically deficient in certain types of nutrients .

So my philosophy on this is that you should first of all follow a whole foods diet , but then you should also be supplementing with general health supplements . So I differentiate between longevity supplements that Novos Specializes in in general health supplements . In general , health supplements are are the ingredients that the government has an RDA for .

Now , keep in mind the RDAs are based on short-term studies to avoid a specific illness , a Short-term Illness , right , so something like scurvy , for example . So you need adequate vitamin C to avoid scurvy . If you're avoiding scurvy with enough vitamin C , the FDA or sorry , the US DA will say , okay , you have an adequate dosage of vitamin C , you're good .

But they're not looking at long-term outcomes . They're not looking at over five years , ten years , twenty years , like what is the optimal amount ? Not the minimum effective dose , but the optimal amount for long-term optimal health .

And so when people say , yeah , I can get like the RDA , first of all you should question that , because you probably aren't getting it , at least for a handful of the nutrients which this and Hain study points out . But then , beyond that , why not just supplements with a very high quality multivitamin and multivitamin mineral ?

And then do a couple of other tweaks to your diet just to cover your bases . You're not going to overdose as long as you don't go too far . With the fat soluble vitamins like D , a , e , k , you won't overdose . And the water soluble vitamins if you have a little bit too much , you'll pee it out , so you'll be fine .

I that's , that's my philosophy on it , that everyone should be doing it and everyone would be in a better place At least with their baseline , foundational health .

And , to your point , he's not telling me to eat all this broccoli , he's actually reducing that because he's saying that this has such a big impact on digestion . We need to have a different profile . We need to look at these different micronutrients .

I thought that was very interesting , even when I was reading your review of this , because I was like , oh , it goes a lot deeper . Right then , just Carbs , fats , protein . It's a lot more to it .

And the microbiome is connected to I believe we have an article , article series actually on the Novos website about the microbiome , but I believe it's eight gut organ axes . So our microbiome a lot of people by now have heard about , like the gut brain axis , right .

So the foods you eat can literally dictate how you feel , like Whether you're in a good mood , a bad mood where you're thinking , whether you're thinking clearly or not , so and so forth . But it can also then impact your liver function , your skin health , your heart , like you go down the list , coming all from the gut and the microbiome .

So that's another thing most people don't think of . If you think of the bodybuilding diet , it's it's broccoli and grilled chicken , right , like that's basically the diet . Well , you're short changing yourself .

You're , first of all , not getting all the micronutrients you get , but then the whole other category is the microbiome and having Diversity of plant-based species , so you have a diverse microbiome , which then leads to healthier life overall .

But what's the perspective on that , whereby you know you don't want to be eating too much volume of fruit and veg ? So how do you do supplement it ? As a result , I Don't .

Or if I go to like Whole Foods , I'll go to the , the you know food court and I will just , like you know , pile on as as diverse as species of of plant foods you know , so like maybe I'll get some fish as my protein and then a little bit of broccoli , just a few pieces , and then a few pieces of cauliflower , and then some chickpeas and then some

lentils and just a little bit of everything , so that I'm getting a very wide range of all of these nutrients and the microbiome can benefit from it . So if you needed to be , you know very convenient about this . A lot of people you know buy frozen vegetables . They're positives and negatives to frozen vegetables .

In some senses , certain nutrients are better preserved because it's frozen right when the food is picked At the . On the other hand , certain nutrients degrade when they're frozen , like folate , for example , can degrade while it's frozen . So that's again where , like having a really healthy multivitamin , a high quality , one could really help to to supplement that .

But you could buy just a bunch of frozen veggies like all different kinds . You open up the bags , you put a little bit in each corner of your plate , you microwave it and now you've got a very convenient , healthy , diverse meal .

Like should you be doing ? Should it be more balanced out between carry-over sclero training and Strength training , or is there a happy medium there for longevity ?

. My , at this time , like with the information that's available to me , my perspective on it is to balance both and and , and I have always tried to maintain like a wide range of physical capacities .

So everything from being able to , you know , walk very , very long distances , to jogging very long distances , to high intensity interval training and like sprinting very fast , and to be able to do that , you know , eight times , a dozen times , being able to do mid distance at a high pace .

So you know , and that's that's getting you into all different forms of cardio . It's from , like you know , zone one cardio up to zone five cardio , different dosages obviously . So most of the time is zone one , you're just walking around . Zone two is second most . Zone three is the third most , you know , down to zone five is the least .

So , having some form of that every day in my routine , I have a rest day where it will only be zone one cardio , but I'm still nonetheless on my feet , I'm still moving around . And then there's the weightlifting side of things , and so when it comes to weightlifting , I've always also tried to have like a diversity of capacities .

So that's everything from the powerlifting side of things like being able to lift like very heavy weights for very few reps to the hypertrophy side of things , to also a little bit more of the endurance side of things . So like , for example , when I was turning 30 years old , I set out to achieve the Guinness Book of World Records for most pull ups seconds .

Unfortunately my submission wasn't accepted so I didn't actually achieve it , but in terms of the number of pull ups at the time I think the record was 43 . I achieved in a training session . My personal best was 53 . And my submission , I believe , was 47 or 48 .

So as far as I was concerned , like in 60 seconds I was able to do more than what the record was . So that that's like strength and endurance to be able to do that many pull ups right at the same time . About a year after that I then tripled my body weight with a deadlift . So I was weighing 175 pounds and I deadlifted 525 pounds .

So in kilos , you know , divide that by 2.2 . So I've always , and when I go to the gym like even today , I did back in biceps and some deadlifts as well , and I'll start with like very high reps on the pull ups and then I will then do lat pull downs where I'm maxing out with 5 reps or 4 reps Right .

And so I've found that , at least for myself , having that flexibility of being able to look very , very heavy things but then also having the endurance to sustain and then being able to , with cardio , all of those other things , I found that that has been the best for me , at least for my goals , and if you know my results for epigenetic age or any indication

which I can't say for sure that there isn't a better way to do this , maybe I can improve my scores even more , but with the scores that I do have , I can at least say I'm not doing something wrong , even if I optimize further .

Before we finish up . The last thing I want to ask you is about alcohol . So I've been trying to keep myself alcohol in about 16 months and from like a everyday perspective , you know , I have a lot more energy . Of course , I'm not hungover . I have a lot more productive , a lot more effective , better mood , better relationships and pretty much everything .

So it's kind of just continued . For me , it's just being a thing that's continuous versus I don't drink alcohol . It's just something like those roles . From a longevity perspective , what have you observed from alcohol ?

The question then becomes is the alcohol actually extending their lifespan ? Is that what is leading them to live , to be a centenarian or a super centenarian ? And my guess is no , it's not .

It's that when you start looking at super centenarians people living 110 years plus , or centenarians living 100 to 110 years they tend to have better genes , so there's specific genes that they have that enables them to live as long as they are Now .

I want to clarify , though 90% of your lifespan is actually based on lifestyle and environment , and only 10% is based on your genetics .

That is true for the vast majority of us practically everyone but there are a few people out of every 1,000 people there might be one that has some specific genes that just they're aging more slowly , they have a higher resistance to stressors in life and their body can repair itself better , and so my suspicion is that these centenarians and super centenarians that

are drinking the wine they just are better able to repair damage caused by the alcohol , and it's not the alcohol itself that is extending lifespan To that point . There was a study done this year that looked at many other scientific studies that were investigating the positive quote , unquote positive effects of alcohol in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease .

Essentially , what they found was , with new mathematical approaches to the data , they found that any dosage of alcohol actually increases the risk of morbidity and death Any dosage , even the smallest amount .

The confounding factor was that the people that were drinking a little bit of wine like one or two glasses , and it seemed like their heart attack levels were lower than other people , was that these were healthier people in the first place , that were not like alcoholics and they weren't binge drinkers , and so on .

There are people who were healthy enough , though , to drink , and a lot of people who were not drinking were not drinking because they had a medical condition , they weren't able to drink , and so on .

So when they looked at the data , without digging into the specifics of the individuals involved in the studies it seemed like drinking a little bit reduced the heart attack levels . But it's actually that the people drinking a little were healthier than the people not drinking at all . And then the people that were overdosing on alcohol were caught up to them .

So when they normalized for that , they showed that any dosage was actually worse for you . So where does that leave us ? I can at least speak for where I find myself . I , when I was in my 20s , drank way too much . Living in New York City . It's a drinking culture . It's a social city .

You go out on a date or you go to a bar or a lounge , a nightclub like that is the culture there . It's not like an outdoor athletic culture , although you have a little bit of that in Central Park and on the West Side Highway . It's not really that type of culture like maybe LA might be .

So I drank too much in my college years and in my 20s I reduced it significantly . In my early 30s I got the Oro ring , which actually helped me reduce it even further , because when I saw what it did to my sleep , even just one glass four hours , five hours before bedtime , still disrupted my sleep .

Four hours before bedtime , one glass of wine disrupted my sleep . That was enough for me to say , all right , there's something , if I want to optimize myself , that this is definitely disrupting it . And then to your point when I cut it out almost completely , I've felt better , I'm more focused , my mood is better , just so many other benefits come from it .

So when I think about the short-term pleasure of having alcohol and feeling the high from it compared to the long-term benefits of not , I almost always elect to not drink . There are exceptions my brother's wedding . I had some wine there for the holidays . Maybe for Christmas or Thanksgiving I'll have some wine , but I minimize it .

Maybe one glass , maybe two max , but I'm not really going to go further than that at this point .

Andrew Huberman did a lot of research into this recently too , and I think it's about , if you are going to do it , have that sensible approach right whereby it's one glass or whatever it is , but the outlier is when you go too crazy , like I'm an Irish guy . Right , this is what happens in Irish culture they drink similar to New York , similar to London .

But when I live in Asia , I don't want to expose to this . On a Saturday , I wake up and I want to surf . On a Sunday , I want to wake up and I want to go for a drive right in the sun . It's completely different , right . So it's kind of like , as you mentioned , situational , environmental is 90% of this , and then the other 10% then is other factors .

So , chris , I want to say a massive thank you . There's honestly got another two hours . I could go . There's a lot more to get through . So I think I'd love to do it again in the future and maybe go a bit more deeper on to the training side of things , the sleep side of things .

There's different aspects I'd love to get into , but I want to say a massive thank you .