Chris Mirabile - Redefining Longevity: NOVOS, Healthspan, and What Really Works

Hey friends, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness and wellness industry podcast for over five years and running. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the honor of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. If you like the show, we'd love it if you took three minutes of your day to leave us a nice supporter review wherever you consume your podcast. If you're interested in staying up to date with the future of fitness, go to futurofitness.co to subscribe and get weekly summaries dropped into your inbox. Now on to the show. Perfect Gym isn't just another gym management system. They are part of the Sport Alliance Group, Europe's leading fitness software company that has officially entered the US market. Now, I've seen this movie before, but here's the difference. They've opened up a US headquarters in Boston because they understand that the American market deserves dedicated, localized support. After digging into the platform, one benefit especially stood out. They are simplifying the nightmare that keeps business owners up at night migrations. These guys were able to migrate one mega client with more than 250 locations in six different countries in just 20 days between two payment runs. No disrupting operations, no member loss, one seamless operation that simply works. Now, if you have ever switched platforms, you know how terrifying that process can be and how truly impressive that feat is. At a high level, here's their secret sauce. They give the power back to the operator. Instead of forcing you into their closed ecosystem, their Perfect Gym Marketplace connects with over 120 integration partners. So want to use your own app, your preferred payment processor, class pass for booking? No problem. Whether you're running a single studio or managing a multi-location enterprise, Perfect Gym was built from the ground up for multi-club operations. They've invested a ton into this platform, and now they're bringing that European engineering excellence to America. The migration experts have arrived. Check out perfectgym.com where enterprise level sophistication meets operator freedom.

We are addressing these fundamental issues that take place that then lead to everything downstream. So if you are starting at the top of the stream, uh the aging process, what it leads to is diseases of aging. The number one risk factor for disease. I'm talking about uh dementia and Alzheimer's, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, glaucoma, sarcopenia. You go down the list, the number one risk factor is aging. If we start at the top, we can conceptually reduce the risk of these diseases. We can also optimize our health in the process. One thing that happens when you optimize these hallmarks of aging is that you also improve performance and well-being in the short term. So you sleep better, you feel better, your energy is better, your skin health is better, your joints feel better, your mood is better. All of these things come because you're optimizing your fundamental drivers of that aging process and cellular dysfunction in the first place.

All right, here we go. Chris Mirabole, welcome.

Thank you. Great to be here, Eric.

Yeah, yeah. Really excited to have you. And the future of fitness uh, you know, is is becoming a lot of different things, as I was telling you when I started this podcast like nine years ago now. Um, there's a holy shit for me moment when I said that to you. I'm like, you know, it was all about like kind of gym operations, training applications, a couple online coaching programs. There was wearable data was just starting to come into the market. But now, dude, it's completely different. Like the different categories and how everything's blending from, you know, we're gonna talk about longevity to well-being to health spans, all those different things. And what you're doing at Novos, obviously, you've been in this game for a little while, you know, you've been watching it evolve, and uh obviously I want to talk about everything you guys are doing as a company, the products, the services, the how you look at this market and how you're expanding over the next few years, but also your take on longevity as a category, right? Like, how how are we doing? It's it's talked about a lot as my opinion, and feel free to disagree was like I feel like it came out super hot and now it's evolving into something else and it's almost diluted but slash maturing. So I don't really know. So I'm gonna shut up. Let's talk with the this. If you just give us a little bit of background, Chris, how you got to be the founder of Novos, and then we'll go from there.

Sure. So my background that goes all the way back to when I was 12 years old, when I first got interested in in health and wellness. I saw an issue of Men's Health magazine in Barnes and Noble, and I picked it up and I was inspired to then ask my dad to help me to build a little uh pull-up bar in the basements from the rafters or hanging with a bicycle chain and a steel pipe. And that was where I would work out every single day, starting at 12 years old. Then when I was 16 years old, I suddenly had a seizure, which came as a surprise to everyone because I was living a healthier life than my classmates. And why would Chris, of all people, get a seizure? And it turned out it was caused by a brain tumor that had been forming in me potentially as early as birth. It was larger than the golf ball. It was a pilocytic astrocytoma on my left temporal lobe. I still have a scar here to prove it. Fortunately, everything was resolved, but going through that experience completely transformed my perspective on life itself, what I wanted to derive from life, what I wanted to contribute to life, and also my perception of what is health. And it went from this superficial side of health, which as a 16-year-old teenager, I thought of it in terms of being attractive to the girls in school, working out, playing sports well, and so on. I wasn't thinking about disease, I was invincible as a teenager, right? Well, I I I um, you know, that taught me that was a lesson in humility, let's say, and it taught me how fragile life could actually be. And I wanted to do everything I could to prevent myself from being in that position again where I was literally sitting on the hospital bed wondering if I would wake up the next morning or not. And so that meant going beyond even just brain tumors, but just diseases, chronic illnesses in the first place. And it was a long journey, my teen years into my 20s, still exercising a lot. I did also kind of get caught up in the you know college life and drinking alcohol and so on, but I wasn't really thinking about, for example, cancer until my mid-20s when it just occurred to me like, wouldn't alcohol potentially be carcinogenic? And there wasn't really that much science behind it, not that many studies. But that got me digging into PubMed, the government website that has all of the scientific studies in biology and medicine listed. And I started going down rabbit holes for that topic, but other topics related to optimizing my health. Any question I had pre-Chat GPT, I was on PubMed asking questions. And I came across a scientific paper more than 10 years ago now called Hallmarks of Aging. And that was an epiphany moment for me. That's when I realized that aging, number one, is not this definitive process that is written into our genetic code. It's actually something that's malleable. Although parts of it, elements of it, are in our genetics, that's only about 30% for the vast majority of us. 70% is lifestyle. And so understanding that aging is malleable, and then that scientists are breaking down the components of the aging process at a mechanistic level. So, what is happening biologically within us that leads to us aging, that leads to changes to our physical form, our skeletal structure, the adipose tissue in our skin, our mitochondrial function, or you know, um uh cellular senescence, these zombie cells that accumulate in our bodies. Why are they happening and why do they actually contribute to the aging process in and of itself? So these were open questions, and I started to then network with top scientists in the field. At first, it was Aubrey de Grey, who's very well known for kind of spearheading the longevity scientific investment movement and research, but then also going to Harvard Medical School and meeting with Dr. David Sinclair and Dr. George Church, going to MIT and Salk Institute and meeting with the top minds in the field, which eventually led me to having a couple of questions that evolved into what is Novos, which I I can tell you about, but I've said a lot already. So I'll take a break here.

It's great. And we'll get all we'll get into novos extensively and the what you guys offer. Let me ask you this to start. You're gonna talk about thing, you gotta define a thing, right? How do you define longevity?

Yeah, so it really comes down to who you're asking to define longevity. So if you go to a hardcore traditional scientist, they would say longevity is defined by increasing max increasing the maximal species lifespan. So whatever species you're studying, you want to increase the lifespan beyond what the max is known to be, at least in natural conditions. Uh in humans, that would be 122 and a half years, that records held by a French lady, Jean Calmont. So if we were to be able to hypothetically, this is not actually uh practically possible, but hypothetically able to run these studies in humans, and we were able to get someone to live to 130, okay. That is by the strictest definition, that is a longevity intervention. When you get uh a little bit more practical about it, uh you throw health span into the equation. So you say increases in health span and or lifespan. That's the definition that we use at my company. So we need to show that we can increase health span and or lifespan. But here's something very key. A lot of people think that something is longevity if it is improving health span to the degree that you are actually living a normal, healthy life. So, in other words, if your lifespan is normally going to be without really doing anything, let's just say 80 years, and your health span is going to be 70 years. So you don't get your first chronic illness until you're 70 years old. If you were on track to getting a chronic illness when you're 60 and you did something, you adjusted it, and now your crop the chronic illness doesn't hit until you're 70. That's not actually longevity. That's actually just being healthy. That's actually just living a normal, healthy life. In order to be considered longevity, it needs to be something that takes you beyond what your natural potential would have otherwise been. So eating salads and going out for walks and moderating your stress and sleeping well, things that in modern society we have to remind people are cornerstones of health. By doing those things or correcting a nutrient deficiency or getting toxic substances out of their lifestyle, doing those things are not longevity in the definitive sense of it. They're just maintaining a healthy life.

There's a lot there. There's a lot there to unpack. And so I guess when I ask you personally, like when you think about longevity, let's, you know, if I'm sitting on the plane with you and you sit down next to me and you're like, hey, what do you do, Chris? Like, I'm in longevity. Cool, what's longevity? Like, how what do you explain to that person?

Yeah, so so I tell them that longevity is the approach to our health in such a way that we want to minimize the chance of disease and maximize health health span and lifespan, going beyond what we would naturally be able to achieve by just living an ordinary life, so to speak. Gotcha. Or just maintaining a standard life. Now, there are different interventions that you can then throw in. There are pharmaceutical drugs being explored for the possibility of being longevity interventions. People have heard of rapamycin and metformin. Even PDE5 inhibitors like Cialis and Viagra may have longevity inducing properties to them for the cardiovascular benefits to them. But that's not something that you would, if you're living in a blue zone, perfectly healthy life and you're already on track to living 105, you're not getting like Cialis in your water, right? At least I hope you're not, right? That's something that you would have to add on top. And if if in theory that person goes from 105 to 107, okay, they got two more extra years out of life from that intervention. Now, this is purely hypothetical, but that would be an example of an intervention that took someone who was already healthy, already primed with all of the basics of a ordin, like a a blue zone, high quality, longevity-centered life. And then they were able to take it even further beyond what they would naturally be achieving.

Awesome. So when you when you started your company, I mean there's a lot of different approaches to the longevity market, right? There's um you know, longevity focused fitness, there's the GLP one or the the peptide market, there's the hormone optimization market, there's all the medical stuff, right? Um and then there's you know the what I would call the fundamental pieces, like how do you improve someone's sleep? How do you improve um you know uh stress levels, like all these things, you know, getting enough vitamins. So when you looked at your approach towards contributing towards better longevity, what made you pick Novos and the products and the offerings you guys have now?

Great question. And and I do have some commentary on some of the things you mentioned, like hormone optimization and peptides. Maybe I can start there quickly because I'm gonna say a few controversial things about those. I love it. And then I can go into what what I do uh with novos and why I do it this way. So, as with practically everything important in life, there's a lot of shades of gray, there's a lot of nuance. And so to take an entire category and conclude something like hormone optimization is good for longevity, it's not so simple. So, hormone optimization for females versus males is very different. And then within males, there's a category that I would say should not be getting any sort of hormone optimization in the form of TRT, and there's a category that should get it potentially. So I'll give you specifics. It is found that estrogen and estrogenic hormones are protective and they can extend health span and lifespan. So for a female getting perimenopausal hormonal therapy, there is a lot of research pointing to long-term health benefits from that in many different ways. Muscle maintenance, uh, metabolism, bone health, and osteoporopis avoidance, and so on and so forth, even down to potentially cognitive benefits as well, and reducing the risk of neurological disorders and so on. So that's a category distinct from men, where when you have androgenic hormones that you and I both have higher levels of than females do, testosterone being one of them, there are there's a lot of scientific studies showing that high levels of androgenic hormones shortens lifespan. Now, then it becomes nuanced. The question is, well, what's a high level? If someone has a relatively healthy level of testosterone or even slightly low, and then they're saying, all right, I'm gonna get TRT, and now they're going into the upper ranges, I'd say no, that's not good for longevity. If somebody has slightly low levels, I would first look into what's the cause of that? Why are your levels a little bit low? Are you drinking too much? Are you overly stressed? Are you not weightlifting? Are you over-training in the other extreme for exercise? All of these things can play a role. Do you have not have adequate nutrients, different minerals and vitamins can play a role in the production of testosterone? I would start there. Just like people blame the pharmaceutical industry saying it's a band-aid approach, TRT is a band-aid approach for most people. Let's figure that out first. If you have very low levels of testosterone, that could cause a problem also, where you don't have adequate muscle building, you don't have adequate motivation, life is just dull. There's a number of other things that can come along with that. With testosterone, it's very nuanced. And for male versus female hormone therapy, it's very different. Now, I'll be a little bit quicker with peptides. Peptides are controversial because I'm taking out a GLP1 drugs, those are technically peptides. I'm not including something like glutathione, that's technically a peptide. I'm talking about the peptides that people are injecting in themselves or they get alternative medicine doctors to inject in them. I would be very careful with those. They are not approved for human use. How many times are doctors telling you this is a research substance that has not been approved by the FDA for human use? And then when you look at drugs or peptides like ipamoralin, which is popular for increasing growth hormone, let's think about this for a second. If growth hormone makes you feel younger, is that the same thing as improving longevity? No, it's not. Because taking a drug, taking cocaine might make you feel young and energetic and like full of life. Does anyone in their right mind think that that is healthy for you? Absolutely not, right? So just because growth hormone makes you feel younger does not mean it's actually good for you in the long term. High levels of growth hormone are found in animal studies to increase the incidence of cancer and thereby shortening lifespan. So, do I think people should be taking growth hormone and getting injected? Similar logic to testosterone, no. I I would figure out why your growth hormone is low. Maybe it's actually just part of the aging process, and maybe we should be at peace with aspects of the aging process rather than always trying to, you know, bring it back to what it once was. In some ways we should, right? Cellular functioning, yes. But in terms of just how we subjectively feel, if that comes at a long-term cost, that would not be longevity. So then back to your original question like, what am I doing at Novos and why are we doing it this way? So when I read that paper, Hallmarks of Aging, I came to understand the biological mechanisms or hallmarks of aging, the causes of the aging process. At the time there were nine. Now there are 12 that have been identified by researchers. And I asked the scientists in the field, would it make sense to try to target all of these simultaneously to slow down the aging process? And if so, can we do it with natural molecules rather than having to invent novel pharmaceutical drugs? And the answer was number one, yes, that's a fantastic idea to target all of them. That would probably, at least hypothetically, have the biggest impact on the aging process that we can do with any sort of exogenous substance. And second, there's no reason to believe that an over-the-counter substance could not have the same effects or notable effects on the aging process as compared to a pharmaceutical drug. So you might just need a higher dosage of the natural molecule as opposed to a pharma that might be more concentrated or specific to a certain receptor site. So that was enough validation for me to say, okay, there's something here. And the reason that scientists were not already targeting all of them is because they have to specialize. In order to get a government grant, they have to have a specialty and they can't be a generalist across everything. And in pharma, they have to focus on the disease, they can't focus on aging. So I saw this as a very special, unique opportunity. So that was the logic behind creating it. So why do we think that this is a superior approach? It's because these are the fundamental reasons why we age in the first place. Why tissues and by extension organs start to break down, or even at a cellular level and a subcellular level, like DNA starting to be mutated. So genomic instability. This is one of the hallmarks of aging. All of this stuff, it lathers up to our tissue performance and our organ performance and our whole body performance. So it's looking at it at the most fundamental level as to as far as we can comprehend why are we aging? And if we start there, we are at the top of the waterfall, if you will, or the top of the funnel. We are addressing these fundamental issues that take place that then lead to everything downstream. So what's downstream? Downstream is now I'm not making claims about my product, FDA reasons, and so on. I'm not making disease claims, but separately, if you are starting at the top of the stream, the aging process, what it leads to is diseases of aging. So the number one risk factor for disease, I'm talking about dementia and Alzheimer's, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, glaucoma, sarcopenia, you go down the list, the number one risk factor is aging. There's a threefold higher risk of getting lung cancer from aging than there is from smoking cigarettes. So if we start at the top, we can conceptually reduce. The risk of these diseases. We can also optimize our health in the process. One thing that happens when you optimize these hallmarks of aging is that you also improve performance and well-being in the short term. So you sleep better, you feel better, your energy is better, your skin health is better, your joints feel better, your mood is better. All of these things come because you're optimizing your fundamental drivers of that aging process and cellular dysfunction in the first place.

And that's I'm glad you brought that up because that was a question I was going to ask. You know, I are you familiar with restore hyperwellness in that franchise? What they've done. Yeah. So I interviewed Jim Donnelly years ago, uh before now he's at Humanot Health and he's moved on to that project. But he made a really good point. And we look at like, you know, this this this was back when um you know recovery was everything, right? Everybody, that was the that was the buzzword of the year. And uh, you know, he made a very fundamental point. It's like all this stuff's great. People want to live longer, they want to feel better in the long term, but they want to feel better now. And that's what like when you looked at the offerings that restore hyperwellness, like people came in, they did a red light sauna, they did a couple things, like they felt they walked out of the building feeling better than they did when they walked in. Now, is there a long-term, you know, uh benefits to that from a legend longevity and health span standpoint? Of course. Like if you keep doing it, like I'm sure there are, right? And there's plenty of studies on it. But that was that's that's the the challenge, I think, in this industry is like people want to feel better now, they want to perform better now, but they also, of course, want to live. But we don't know, like we don't know what's gonna happen. I could walk out of this door and get hit by a train, right? God forbid that happens. I mean, have to be pretty dumb to let that happen, but you know, it could, right? And like then, like all this stuff's worthless. So I think that that's part of it. And when you look at the messaging and the products you guys put forth, how do you walk that line between telling people, hey, we're gonna optimize your health, right, in the current form, but we're also gonna help you, you know, 40 years from now, 50 years from now.

Yeah, great question. So this was something we were cognizant of while we were formulating before we even put our first product on the market. And so we, together with the scientists on our advisory board, these people from Harvard MIT and so on, we were looking at the hallmarks, these mechanisms of aging, what natural ingredients could favorably impact them. Then we also thought about different biological pathways and phenomena, for example, hormesis, which is putting a stressor on the body in which you come back stronger. This is great for mitochondrial health, for example. But if you overdo it, then you actually can have a toxic effect. You can you can have a negative effect on the body. So we were conscientious of not over only synergies across ingredients, but also something called disergies. So these are negative synergies where you can come back even worse condition by combining ingredients. This is something people don't typically think about when they stack different supplements, but it's a very real phenomenon known in the scientific literature. It's just not something that's commonplace. Everyone's trying everyone else's stack and so on. So this is something we were conscientious of when we were formulating. But not only that, every single ingredient in our flagship product novos core, for example, had to have demonstrated in at least one animal species that it could extend lifespan. And ideally in multiple animal species. Because if it's in multiple, that means whatever pathways we are exploiting is evolutionarily conserved across species, which means that evolution has decided that this pathway is important enough to keep it in place, which increases the likelihood that it's conserved in humans as well, and is going to have a favorable effect on human lifespan and health span as well. So that was the criteria for which ingredients to include. But then the question turned to, and this is to your point, what ingredients meet this criteria, but also demonstrate short-term benefits as well. Improvement in skin health. People like how want to look in the mirror. And when you think of longevity, people want to look good, right? Uh improvements in energy. That's closely associated with longevity. Improvements in cognition, also associated with longevity. And then uh potentially even improvements in sleep, which can then result in improvements in energy, uh, going back to the initial point. So we included ingredients, for example, like high oral hyaluronic acid, uh glucosamine sulfate, uh calcium alpha ketoglutarate, and glycine, a building block of collagen. These can help with the extracellular matrix of the skin, the hydration of the skin, the collagen in the skin. And we find that within 30 to 60 days, a very large percentage of our customers notice improvements in skin health. Not talking about you know going from 50-year-old skin to 30-year-old skin. We have to be realistic here. But noticing improvements in complexions and even people complimenting. This is anecdotal, but I've heard many people saying that they're getting compliments from strangers or their friends about their skin. For energy, an adaptogen, rhodiola rosea, fantastic for energy, especially when when you're under stress. Uh, the magnesium can help a lot with energy. Both of those can also help with sleep. Cognition, L-theanine, the rhodiola, the magnesium. We have a micro dose of lithium in our formula. Controversial for some people. Why would you include lithium? They associate it with the prescription dose, which is hundreds of times higher. We use one milligram, which is in the neighborhood of what we actually got naturally in evolution from drinking stream water and well water and eating fresh fish, which lithium is an element and it makes its way into the water. But it's associated with better cognitive function, long-term cognitive health, etc. Harvard just put out a very big paper on this a few months ago that was published in one of the world's top journals, Nature Aging, talking about the effects of lithium on neurological decline. Again, I'm not making a claim about my product, but they published this and it's it's very interesting research. So those are just a few examples of the point being that we were very cognizant of short-term benefits, mood, cognition, focus, energy, skin health, and sleep.

Awesome. Maybe give us a summary of all the because you mentioned a lot of different products there. Like what are the major product categories you have and how they do that? I know there's the the bars, right? Um, the pre-packaged bars, which were actually delicious. I brought those on a couple of hunting trips. You have uh the um packets that you dissolve in water, right?

Novos core, yep. That's core here.

Uh and then what else you got? You got the gummies? You have a bunch of different things, right? So, yeah, walk us through the whole game.

Yeah, so so all of those benefits I just cited was all for this one single product, Novos Core. So this is our flagship product. This is what we've put the most research into. We've done scientific studies at universities around the world to show in in vitro context and with human cells that we have a positive impact on multiple of these mechanisms of aging, like genomic instability. So we looked at the effects of irradiation on DNA oxidation, but even chemotherapeutics on keratinocytes, so these are human skin sites, and single and double strand breaks to the DNA. This was done at University of Bologna. It's a peer-reviewed study. We looked at oxytosis, pharoptosis, and cellular inflammation, which can lead to different diseases. Again, it's in vitro, so no disease claims here, but it was found that we had a very positive effect on those processes. That was done at the Salk Institute. We looked at cellular senescence at Newcastle University, and it showed that we reduced the size of senescent cells to the same order of magnitude as the prescription drug rapamycin, which is the gold standard in longevity prescription drugs. Then we went on to a mouse study, and we showed that we were able to extend aged mouse lifespan more than any supplement ever studied in the world. It was nearly 20% extension of lifespan. And by for context, if you look at an ingredient like an NAD plus booster like NR, in studies it's been found to extend, these are distinct studies, but found to extend lifespan by 0% in the ITP study to up to 5%. So we were almost four times greater extension than that. Then we actually, and we we haven't published this yet, so I can't say much, but we did do a human clinical study. And uh it was a double-blind randomized placebo controlled study done by a very well-known researcher in the field of cardiology. So we're looking at heart health, and all I can say is we have very, very good results. Uh, I can't really say any more than that at this point, unfortunately. And what more? Then, sorry, so so that's for Novos Core. Then the next product is Novos Vital. So Novos Vital is a daily chew. You referred to it earlier. Uh Novos Vital is focused on organs that decline as we age. So think of the brain, eyes, heart, liver, kidney, muscle, and gut. So when we create products, we want to create things that don't exist on the market. Like, what's the point of us creating a competitor to something else that already exists? Like, I want to innovate. I want to do something unique, special that I personally want to take myself. So we're always challenging ourselves. And so for this, we have 11 times more active ingredients in our chews, in our gummies, than a typical health gummy has. And we have seven active ingredients in the formula. It helps with metabolism, digestion, and detox, as well as vision and cardiovascular health. Then we have Novo's Boost, which is one simple ingredient. It's NM nicotinamide mononucleotide. That's a precursor for NAD. And uh, this more and more people are becoming familiar with it. More and more companies are selling it. We were one of the first companies to bring it to market. FDA tried to restrict its sale. I lobbied on Washington to help to get that ban lifted. And fortunately, that was lifted a few months ago. And so it's free for sale again. And then finally, the Novos bars, which you mentioned. So we just released these two months ago. They are the world's healthiest protein bars. And I know that sounds hyperbolic, but I can justify it. So we thought of every single detail for these bars. We thought of the proteins, the specific amino acids in the proteins. We made sure that we had low levels of methionine and isoleucine. Little known fact, these amino acids are shown in animal studies that when they're high, they accelerate aging and shorten lifespan. And when they are restricted and low, animals live longer than average lifespans. So that would be a definitive longevity approach. Second, instead of seed oils and chemical preservatives, we use organic olive oil and rosemary. We have five longevity supplements in the formula. So three functional mushrooms and all at clinical doses, lion's mane, rishi, and cordyceps, good for immune function, energy production, cognition, and so on. And then we've got one and a half grams of taurine found to extend lifespan in animal studies, also has potentially cardiovascular benefits and energy benefits, and Aztexanthin, which is what makes salmon red or pink. And it is very good. It's a carotenoid, it's very good for skin health. It's also been shown in animal studies to extend lifespan, specifically in the NIH's ITP study, which is the highest standard for animal studies for lifespan extension. It passed the test, astex xanthin. So we have three milligrams of that in the product. Finally, to wrap up on it, we also have 50% of the daily value of practically all of the vitamins that there are uh that there's an RDA for, except for vitamin A. Every other one we're at we're at or above 50%, um a lot of minerals in the in the product as well. So you're getting basically a half a multivitamin per bar. You have two bars, you've got all of your daily uh vitamin needs plus all of these other benefits that come from the product.

Nice. When uh Chris, when did you start this company?

So I I founded it back in 2019 officially. I was planning it in 2018. 2019 I founded it. We spent two years uh bringing on our scientists and doing RD and uh formulation beta and so on. And we launched the first product officially in 2021.

Okay. Yeah, tell me a little bit about the company, like whatever you can share publicly, right? Like you guys raised some money, um, how many employees do you have? What does your advisory board look like? And then I I would also like to know part two of that is like who's buying this? Because I think everyone feels that longevity is for old rich white dudes, right? I think that's uh my words, not anyone else's, but it's kind of what everyone thinks about when they think of it. Um so I'm curious, yeah, who what generationally like who's buying it, that type of thing. So yeah, so tell me a little what you can about the company, and let's get into the consumer.

Sure, sure. So so we are venture capital funded. I have kept a very lean operation. So we have uh burned very little capital and we've grown very aggressively. We may very well raise another round relatively soon because the market is heating up and uh we are we have the most solid foundation of any company in the space by far. So I think it's time for us to really catapult um as a business. So that that might be coming soon. Our team is uh relatively lean. We're a distributed team. I believe in finding the best talent across the world in the different functions. So, for example, our marketing team tends to be based in New York. There are excellent marketers in New York. My head of RD, Dr. Diogo Barardo, we took him from Brian Kennedy's lab at National University of Singapore. He now lives back at home in Portugal, where he's originally from. We have our head of supply chain and operations. He's in Los Angeles. We took him from SpaceX. He was in charge of the satellite supply chain for SpaceX. So we look for the best talent wherever they might happen to be, and we we bring them on. What was the other question? Sorry.

The the consumer. Like who are you guys targeting? Like who's the reality of it? I mean, I've read a lot of things about Gen Z and millennials are really on board, especially in the CPG category for wellness and longevity. And yeah, so I'm I'm curious what you guys are seeing.

Yeah. So when we first launched, we were definitely male dominated, probably 60, 40 male to female. That's partly due to the fact that we we really came out of the scientific lab and we were very scientific. And then even the aesthetic was a little bit more masculine, like uh um kind of stoic, like dark colors with marble and granite and stuff like that. And so we've since updated our brand image and it's a lot more gender-neutral, balanced, high-end appeal to it. And we also updated our messaging and our communication. So while we haven't lost the scientific rigor and the depth that we go to with the content that we'll produce, like we'll produce PhD level contents and publish that on our blog, for example. We also then produce more balanced, easier to comprehend content as well. Uh, and we speak to the female audience oftentimes as well, uh, things like hormonal changes. Women have a unique um uh uh I don't know, unique needs when it comes to longevity relative to men. And so we need to we need to speak to both audiences, and and we have done so. So now we're looking at probably closer to 55, 45 female-male ratio. In terms of age, it did start a little bit older, but we did also have some like you know, tech-minded people like uh tended to be males in their 20s who were really into what we were doing as well from the start. As we've we've matured, we were, for example, asked by Erwan to join their store. So they um they invited us and we were now on their shelves. They added us into a smoothie, and so things like that start to become more appealing to younger female audiences. And so so we've gotten um a good amount of them as well. What I'd say is distinct about us versus other brands that are entering the market now is that you've got a lot of, I would call them bro science brands. So these aren't actual science, they're just bro science. It's like, hey, I do this, so trust me, bro. And and so that I do feel like it is more appealing to younger people and it is more appealing to men. We are we're cut from a different cloth. We are really about, I care more about being respected by the scientific community and the medical community than I care about being respected by an influencer or a celebrity. I think that that is the the long-term approach, is that we really need to prove that what we're doing is worth your money and is worth you ingesting the products we're producing for you. I want to be confident that what I'm giving you is actually making you healthier. And in the worst case, it's it's not making you less healthy, which is actually possible when you're ingesting something, right?

Yep.

So we take scientific rigor very seriously at Novos. And I think that that uh that attracts a different clientele. We're not trying to be mass market, we're trying to be the best of the best, validated by the top minds in the space.

Kristen, in a subtle shift here, um, because you and I talked about this prior to recording, and I want to make sure you touch on it. Where do you feel like the longevity industry maybe has gone astray in certain ways?

Well, I I would say even just in the definition of longevity. So that's where we started this conversation, talking about like what actually is longevity. And you know, I've I've told other people this before, but it it makes me laugh because I I remember not too long ago, I was in Soho in New York City, and there was a blackboard sitting outside of a of a cafe, and it said, come in for our longevity lunch. And I go in and I ask them what the longevity lunch is, and it's a salad. No. It's a salad. And it's like, are you really calling that a longevity lunch? I mean, listen, if you included certain like, I don't know, compounds that are not really found in the typical diet that are shown to extend health span, lifespan, okay, like maybe you can market it that way. But you're just including like normal ingredients you can get uh at a salad bar. Like, I wouldn't call that a longevity, a longevity meal. I think that overall people are just overusing the term. Everyone wants to apply the word longevity to what they're doing. Practically, the very, very little few things are actually truly longevity in terms of the definition of what is longevity. So I would just be careful about the use of it. It's gotten to the point that I told you before we started recording that the top scientists in the field of biogerontology, which is the study of aging, so that is the true longevity field. They don't like the term longevity anymore. They want to stop using it because of the way that it's been commercialized and overused by people. It's not being used properly anymore. So I would just urge some caution for people whenever they see the word longevity or even things like biological age, like have some skepticism. Like, is this really longevity or is this just general health and biological age? How are you measuring biological age? There's a legitimate way to do it with, say, epigenetic clocks or proteomic clocks and using a specific set of algorithms that have been clinically verified in scientific studies, like the Dune Pace clock or the Grim Age clock, versus getting it done from like function health and just getting some biological age output that isn't really at the same quality level as the epigenetic clocks. I'll just give you the example. I know the algorithm they use for it, and that algorithm told me that I am 24 years younger than I am chronologically. So come on, am I really a 17-year-old? I'm 41. Am I really a 17-year-old? I I and I know you don't take biological age literally. You you you take it in terms of morbidity and mortality risk if it's doing its job properly. But still, I don't think I have the morbidity mortality risk of the average 17-year-old. Other clocks have said that I'm in my late 20s. I think that's a lot more realistic. If you consider that your risk of death doubles every seven to eight years, same thing for risk of morbidity. If it's putting me in my late 20s, let's just say approximately 14 years younger, that would mean I have a quarter of the risk of the typical 41-year-old of morbidity or mortality. Now I'm oversimplifying things, but for the sake of the audience to understand. Now, if if it was actually what the the other algorithm said, I mean, we're talking about like one sixteenth of the risk or something in that neighborhood. Like I don't think that that's realistic. I I have aged, you know, time has passed. And so so yeah, I take those with a grain of salt and I urge people to just be skeptical of the the use of these terms and and really question is this something that is truly longevity or just clever marketing?

Yeah. Yeah, well said. Well, last question I always ask you, Chris. You know, what what do you what do you need help with? And I asked that in the means of like people from the industry are listening. What would you like to hear from them about? You know, are you building your team? Dimensions of fundraising. Uh yeah, what what what challenges are you facing right now?

I wouldn't I wouldn't position it as much as a challenge as an opportunity, which is that we we are at that stage where we're excited for collaborations. Uh, we're excited, and those collaborations can be in many different forms. It could be with uh retail collaborations, it could be with a strategic partnership, it it could be collaborating on content creation or public speaking. I've I've been invited to speak in all corners of the world at Harvard. In February, I'll be speaking at Stanford. Like there's a lot of speaking that I'm doing on the subject matter. So just ways that companies are interested in potentially collaborating, and even individuals. Uh, we have an affiliate program at Novos. So for us, it's important to just bring on the top-tier individuals and entities that believe in the approach that we're taking at Novos, uh, are tired of all of this social media hype around things that are just kind of hollow and they want something really substantive and real and legitimate. For people who think that way, we're excited to talk to them and find what find ways that we can potentially work together.

Awesome. Awesome, man. And uh, what's the best way for people to reach out? Go to the website, LinkedIn, what what do you like?

Yeah, so Novos is Novos Labs on practically all of the social networks. I have an account called Slow My Age. So I'm on Instagram and X, and uh I have a new, newly launched YouTube channel, all Slow My Age, and then I'm also slowmyage.com. Novoslabs.com slowmyage.com. On Novos Labs, you'll find at the bottom of the website information about like affiliate programs and connecting with us.

Right on. Well, Chris, well, thanks for spending some time with me, man. It's been super interesting. And uh, you know, as this longevity thing continues to evolve and iterate and uh you know the market continues to react in various ways, it's always it's a fascinating conversation still. I mean, it captures the imagination, right? We've always thought about you know the science fiction science fiction aspects of living forever, you know, as long as we can. And uh I think that's part of all this, is why it's so exciting. So appreciate you joining me, ladies and gentlemen, Chris Barvoli.

Thank you, Eric.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This was your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minute. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.