Episode #590: Inside NOVOS-How Chris Mirabile and Top Scientists Approach the Longevity Movement

0:01 This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks NYC. I have the pleasure of introducing to our Halo community Chris Atnovos. He is the founder, and we are going to talk about longevity. We're going to talk about the efficacy of supplements, ingredients, putting together an advisory board, biological age, Taylor Swift, and the Halo movement. Chris, welcome to your first Halo Talks. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here. Yeah. So, so give us some background here. You know, maybe tell us about what happened to you personally and how this kind of turned into a lifelong journey of preventative health, which we've been talking about now for a short 26 years on our end, and maybe actually finally seeing some of the tea leaves of that being, being adopted across the world. Yeah. Well, it's funny you say 26 years because that's approximately how long I've been interested in longevity for ever since the health events. So I'll be 42 in May. And when I was 16 years old, I was suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor.

1:04 It came after having a seizure out of the blue. I was on a school trip in New York City and I suddenly got dizzy and nauseous. And next thing I knew, I woke up having passed out and blood all over my shirt from severing my tongue from the seizure. And They rushed me to the hospital to give me a CAT scan and to find that I had a larger than golf ball tumor above my left ear in my left temporal lobe. It was bumping up against my memory center, against my senses, and even my speech center. And so very high risk and sensitivity area. Fortunately, they did the surgery and Everything has worked out for the long term, but that completely changed my perspective on health. I was already a healthy person. I was exercising, weightlifting since I was 12 years old, but then going through an experience like that, it kind of evolved my thinking about health from being more superficial focused, like, hey, I want to like build muscle and be in good shape and so on, to realizing that biology is about avoidance of disease and optimizing our biology so that we can perform our best cognitively, physically, emotionally, uh, here and now. And so I started to look at health through that lens of long-term health starting when I was 16 years old, which is 26 years ago now. So, um, so when you went to college, did you kind of know what you were, you

2:36 know, going to pursue? At that point where the average college kid is still, you know, trying to figure out how they want to spend their career or even if they'll have one? Yeah, well, so for me, it was a little bit of a different journey than most. So when I was 15 years old, I started programming for a company in New York City. It was a tech startup company during like the tech boom of the late '90s. And working in a startup environment, I was inspired by it. But then having the brain tumor, it really solidified this idea in my mind that I wanted to make an impact on the world through entrepreneurship. Like, you know, everyone has their way to do it. And for me, it felt like the best way to do it would be by essentially creating technology, creating good in society. So I ended up studying by the advice of the CEO of that company. He said, if you're going to want to run a business, the fundamental is finance. You need to understand finances. So I went to NYU Stern and studied finance, economics, and international business.

3:41 And my first year out of college, I sold my soul to private equity, and I did that for the first year. And I was at a company called— or a fund called Putnam Lovell, which is now part of Jefferies. And so I started there, and after a year, I had entered the NYU Stern Business Plan Competition and ended up winning it with a social network idea that I had back then and spent 6, 7 years working on that. But all the while, my passion has always been health. So in my personal life, you know, every day going to the gym, reading about health and nutrition and self-experimenting with different diets and supplements and so on. So that was always a part of my life starting in my teens into my 20s. And then it really took on a whole new level about a dozen years ago in my late 20s when I came across a few scientific papers that really inspired me. And then I started to meet with the top scientists and geneticists and biogerontologists in the field of, of aging.

4:51 And that's where things really transformed for me. And I was inspired to start, eventually start my company, No post. Great. Just a couple of questions related to use of words, because we— I used to call myself an active lifestyle and wellness banker. And then I realized after several years that I never came to a private equity fund with an awesome wellness idea. It kind of just like didn't sound right to me coming out of my mouth. And I found out that the word wellness was created by a guy at the Mayo Clinic back in the '50s. And he was a biostatistician, Dr. Halbert Dunn. And he was basically trying to come up with the antonym of illness. So wellness is basically you're not sick. And that term, it's like the wellness movement. And I feel like with all the science and the clinical trials and what you put in your body, what you don't put in your body, all these things are known. So it's not trying to make sure people don't get sick. It's actually to try and optimize them and, you know, younger for longer, as I see on your tagline, you know, for NOVOS. But when did you start using words like longevity, anti-aging? Which words do you like? Which words don't you like? Yeah, don't like the word anti-aging. Longevity, when I was 16 years old and I had this experience, I didn't know of the term longevity. I wasn't thinking in those terms, but it was essentially longevity in the sense that I was looking at everything through the lens of long-term health, where I think

6:25 most people, when they're thinking of health, they're thinking of some sort of short-term outcome, like they want to build more muscle mass, or they want to focus more, or more energy, or better libido, or better skin health, whatever it might be. It's always like here and now, this is what I want. But the, uh, unique perspective I had as a gift of having had this disease was I looked at everything through the lens of not only short-term goals, but then long-term outcomes. Are the things I'm doing going to lead to a better, worse, or neutral outcome in 10, 20, 50 years from now? And so that, I think, would be at the core, the essence of longevity. I only started to use that term longevity probably about a dozen years ago when I came across on PubMed the study that's now considered the seminal piece in the field of biogerontology, which is the Hallmarks of Aging. And realizing that there are fundamental contributors at a microscopic biological level that lead to us aging, that was like an empowering moment for me to understand that we can target those specific hallmarks. And animal studies have shown that when you do target them, you extend lifespan. And when you, when you encourage them, they shorten lifespan. So that was really, that was like an epiphany moment for me to come to this understanding that there are these component pieces to aging. Because

7:57 most people, I think we just assume aging is part of life. It's like maybe it's written in our DNA. Or I see people on Facebook commenting on our posts all the time saying God determines when I die. And it's like, all right, maybe, maybe there's some truth to that. But ultimately, If you're smoking a pack a day, you're going to die. You know, God's going to say you're dying earlier than if you're eating healthier and you're not smoking a pack a day, right? Or at least statistically speaking, it's going to happen earlier. So we've spent some time on the advisory and on the banking side in, you know, quote unquote, like the med spa space at large, if you will. And one of the things that I try to— I'm trying to calibrate for myself is if you took 100 people that went into a med spot today. I want to get your perspective on this. And you say, how many of those people want to look and feel better like tonight? How many of those people want to look and feel better over the next 30 days or maybe get like a testosterone shot or an NAD shot or something? And how many of those people out of 100 are saying like, I want to live till I'm 100?

9:01 How do you kind of break down? Maybe there's some people that overlap, but I feel like there's still a fair amount of people who'd be like, hey, I don't fucking care what happens in a month or 2 months or a year from now. I'm just trying to go out tonight and I want to look good, or this month I want to feel a certain level of energy. So how do you respond to that question? Yeah, well, it's definitely true. Like human psychology, we have this cognitive bias to really only care about what's happening here and now and immediately in front of us. And we have a really hard time grasping the significance and the value of looking far out into the future. I mean, that's the struggle that every insurance— life insurance agent has to deal with. Like people don't want to— sacrifice their money today for the sake of something that's decades out into the future. But obviously, life insurance still exists as an industry. So there is a way to convince people emotionally and psychologically to still invest into their future.

9:54 But I would say that in that med spa scenario, to your exact question, I think the vast majority are going to care about how they feel today, or they'll take the sacrifice to do something today for the sake of how they're going to look in a week or in a month or 2 months from now. You see this in, in like the cosmetic spas, right, where so like a woman might get a, um, like a ablative laser treatment and they, they are all red and inflamed for like 2 weeks and their skin is peeling and they're all doing this so that like a month later they're gonna look like their skin's gonna be fresh like a baby's. So people will make investments months into the future. I think that for us at Novos, what we've thought of from day one before we even launched our first product was how can we create a product that's going to be good for healthspan and lifespan and have a very strong scientific-driven hypothesis for design of that formulation? And then of course, we can get into the scientific studies we've done since then, but start there and then include ingredients that are going to have short-term pronounced effects, benefits, because it's all about, as we kept saying when we were formulating it, it's about compliance. You need to make sure that somebody is going to continue to take the product so that it helps them in the long term. So you need to show them short-term benefits to keep them on the product for long enough for it to actually then make a difference for healthspan and lifespan.

11:26 This is Pete Moore. I want to let you in on a little secret. There's this company called Promotion Vault. And what they do is they give out rewards from retailers that allow you to incentivize your members without having to do zero down and one month free or giving away shakes or giving away t-shirts. What you wanna do is build a rewards program that lasts, that people value, and that doesn't discount your own products and services. So here's the deal. There's something called Rewards Vault. The Rewards Vault is going to allow a member to set up their own profile. They are going to answer questions. You are going to get those answers. You're going to be able to target those members and you're going to reward them inside your club, inside your spa, and outside of the club and outside of the spa to get them to become loyal, to get them to pay their monthly dues and to be rewarded properly for the actions. A lot of companies are cutting back on rewards. You shouldn't be.

12:23 Promotion Vault's your answer. Trust me. This is real. So talk about NOVOS. And the one thing that was interesting to me when I went onto your website and was researching for this podcast, that you've got a lot of serious, serious doctors and scientists involved in this from Harvard Medical School. I went to Harvard Business School, MIT. Talk about to you know, maybe an entrepreneur that's listening to this and being like, hey, maybe I'm the next Novos in some other category or maybe a competitor even, right? Or part of the ecosystem. You know, how long does it take to, to develop those relationships, get those people to kind of say like, hey, I'm going to get involved and I'm on board with you. You can use my name and my clinical trials and then potentially, you know, picking you as like their horse, if you will. In this space where, you know, they're taking reputation benefit and risk at the same time?

13:27 I think, I think what you just said at the end is the most critical factor, which is reputation is the most valuable asset that any of us have. But then when you look at a scientist, it's an even bigger value to them because their reputation is everything. And so what I say is that It's important for the scientist or whoever it might be that you want to have involved in your organization, and especially if they're going to be a public face, for them to trust in you and what you are going to— how you're going to treat them and your organization because they're associated with your organization. They need to trust that you are the type of person morally, ethically to maintain a high standard that's aligned with their own standards.

14:16 And it's, it's easy to say that. It's not so easy necessarily to convince them of that. I think that the, the best things are, number one, having a reputation that precedes you. So having work experience and then being able to see what you've created before and how you behaved professionally. I think references, of course, or referrals into the people. So for example, I didn't one day just show up on Dr. George Church's lab and knock on the door and say, hey, take a meeting with me. Now, Dr. George Church, for those who don't know, he is a legendary geneticist. He's a professor both at Harvard Medical School and at MIT. He's a technologist as much as he is a geneticist. He brought down the price of genetic sequencing with his inventions. By about 200,000 times. So it used to cost about $2 billion, now it costs $100 because of his inventions. Uh, he's been considered the top 50 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. I mean, he's, he's a living legend, and most people expect he'll get the Nobel Prize for his work.

15:31 So, uh, how did I, how did I build a relationship with him? Well, I first built a relationship with a nonprofit that he is involved with in the field of longevity. And I, I proved myself to that nonprofit, and I got that nonprofit to want to work with me. And after they came, uh, I built trust with them. They then were willing to lend their name to George Church to say, hey, we think you should meet this guy Chris. He's got a great idea. And by the way, he's also going to be partnering with the nonprofit and donating equity to the nonprofit. So that's something I did when I started Novos. I donated actual sizable amounts of equity to the nonprofit. And so I built this incentive structure where it's a win-win for all of us. And it's in all of our best interests to behave morally, ethically, and rise to the standards that everyone would expect. So as you take a look at the people that you have on your advisory board, board, and then you see some of the things that are going on, whether it's on e-commerce, social media, different agencies coming down on certain groups saying like, "Hey, you're promoting this, but you're compounding this. These ingredients say X, but they're actually Y," when somebody does an actual test on what it is. "You claim that these things are good for you. They're actually all bad for you." How do you play in this space where you've got a very empirical and highly

17:04 ethical business model and go-to-market strategy and kind of deal with the bullshit as also like saying like, I'm playing the long game and I think the long game is truth. Yeah, so you keep nailing it towards the end of your question because the long game is essentially how I look at it. I tell my team that, this is the classic fable of the tortoise and the hare. And we see the hare bouncing around all the time. A new company in the longevity space pops up. It's got a very famous celebrity athlete as their spokesperson. They pretend that they're a very scientific organization. They're paying every doctor spokesperson you can find to speak positively of them.

17:49 They've got an enormous budget, and I see them as being like the hare. And they're even making the claim that they're the first company to target the 12 hallmarks of aging. We were. We had a press release dated almost 2 years before they even existed. And so we're the tourists. We're the ones who are doing the hard work. We're doing the research. These things don't happen overnight. We've got more than 7 years of R&D behind our product. We've got a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled study that is coming out in the next week, most likely, with amazing results. I would argue in some capacities it's never been seen before by a supplement. And these things don't come quickly, and they, they aren't things that just, you know, you can buy your way to.

18:34 You need to earn your way to them. But I do believe that over the long term, we will, we will win. Now, that doesn't mean that these other companies won't do well. If they do, good for them. But in terms of consumers who are looking for the highest grade of efficacy and scientific legitimacy and to find companies that are truly innovating the field and making new scientific discoveries based on the research that they're doing, we want to proudly be part of that set. And I want to look back on my life in, in 10 years, 20 years from now and say, I know that I have genuinely improved people's health, and that I have furthered the field of longevity rather than just taking a trendy ingredient, throwing a marketing pitch behind it, and getting an influencer or celebrity behind it, and then trying to sell the business in 3 or 4 years. Like, I'm in this for the long game, and I want to genuinely innovate and improve people's health. Now, you were back on the show— you were originally on the show in October 2023. So we're about 2.5 years later. Just from an entrepreneurial and CEO and company building standpoint, maybe give the audience here a little bit of maybe psychologically what's happened over the last couple of years from a maturity level, from an aha moment, from a conviction, from maybe a frustration, maybe doubting yourself at some point. When some of these other companies come out, you'd be like, ah, dude,

20:06 I got another hair jumping around. What is this shit gonna— moments over the last 2, 2 and a half years that you can think of off the cuff? Yeah, there are all different ones. So I would say on the positive side, it really comes down to the scientific research and the credibility that we're earning for ourselves. I would say some of the more recent ones is as of January of this year, we're proudly now being sold by the Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic store. There are very, very few companies that, especially in the supplement space, I believe there's only maybe 2 or 3 that the Mayo Clinic store actually retails. And that, that was after a year and a half of discussions with them, and only after they saw not only our historical research but this most recent placebo-controlled clinical trial that they said, okay, we want to— some of the practitioners, including the head of longevity medicine at Mayo Clinic Arizona said, I want to recommend this to my patients. I want it readily available at the Mayo Clinic store.

21:10 So that, that is something that is symbolic. It's not a huge revenue driver, right? We're not going to— it's not going to compare to the revenue we make direct to consumer. But the symbolic value of the Mayo Clinic, of all hospitals, it's arguably the number one in the world to be offering our product. And you know how doctors are with supplements. They're very skeptical. Cycle. So for them to have our product, I think it says a lot about us. The clinical trial, which we'll be releasing very soon, we looked at functional markers of cardiovascular health. So we looked at flow-mediated dilation— this is endothelial function and the ability for blood to flow or circulation— we looked at arterial flexibility, and we looked at systolic blood pressure. And we outperformed across these, these, these different functional markers. Things including resistance training, high-intensity interval training, loss of 22 pounds of body weight, omega-3 fatty acids, dietary nitrates and, uh, beetroot powder, um, quercetin, resveratrol, uh, you know, I'm kind of grouping it together across all of these markers. We'll have more to share obviously once we publish it. But the point is we are top, like, best in class as a nutritional formula comparable to these lifestyle dramatic lifestyle changes like high-intensity interval training. So, so that's a big one. In terms of frustrations, you want the negatives too.

22:40 I'd say, you know, when, when you have influencers that hit the market and, and they claim to be experts and they say things that are completely counter to the scientific evidence, but they're doing it purely for commercial intentions, you know, that's one thing. But then when they go as far as like claiming that they are doing it for public interest and it's not for the money and so on, when it clearly is, at least for somebody who knows the industry and what they're doing, that's a little bit frustrating and that happens. But But ultimately, at the end of the day, you can't let that— you can't focus on that. You got to kind of just brush it off and move on and say, I'm on my own path. I'm going to focus on my own path and succeed here while other things are just noise. This is Pete Moore. Here's the last tip for you of the podcast. We are partnered up with a company called HigherDOSE, higherdose.com. They are the leader in workout recovery products, infrared technology, LED light masks, neck enhancers, and other products such as PEMF mats and sauna blankets. If you have not gotten on the workout recovery train yet, your time and your stop is now. You gotta get these products in there before these workout recovery and spas end up saturating your market. Having your members walk outta the club and going into one of their locations for $200 per month where they're paying $39

24:12 to you. Let's become an expert in workout recovery if we are already an authority in workouts. HigherDOSE, check it out. There's a wholesale code and we look forward to helping you augment your products and services to meet the demands of your members. And hey, let's get people happy. Healthy and sweating, and the recovery should be just as good as the workout. And then I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the biological age. And as I referenced earlier, I got my Spotify age last year, did my Swiftie, Taylor Swift listening activities down to 24. So about 30 years below my actual age. What's the, What do you do with NOVOS and your real age biological test? And what can somebody expect if they're on your product, maybe just holistically about reducing it?

25:10 Sure. So biological age is a very complicated topic, something that we could spend hours talking about. But to make it very simple, biological age in the most ideal manifestation of it would be a tool that's able to tell you essentially how old you are biologically, meaning your, your risk of disease, your risk of mortality, and your functional decline or your functional abilities. And there's different ways to measure this. There are phenotypic tests. These are things that are looking at, uh, like sit-stand test and grip strength and forced expiratory volume, how much you can blow out from your mouth in in a second, multiple different things. Then there's epigenetic tests. And so if you go down that whole field of omics, you have epigenetics, transcriptomics, proteomics, it's all complex. The point is that everyone out there is claiming to tell you their biological age and caveat emptor because a lot of it is not solid science. The results are not accurate or precise. And so you have to be careful with who you believe when someone says that they're biologically a certain age. Like you were joking about Taylor Swift age. Like, you know, there are companies out there or people out there who might actually try to present something like that. That's an exaggeration, but something like that essentially being like, oh, I'm 24 biologically. It's like, come on, you're basing it on what you listen to on Spotify. That doesn't count. So we want to find things that are very accurate. And so

26:40 epigenetic tests are the most accurate that we can find right now. They're not perfect, but they're the, the, the state of the art in the industry right now. We offer at Novose a test called Novose Age, which is using an algorithm. It's not our own. It's called the DunedinPACE algorithm created by researchers at Columbia and Duke Universities. And it's a simple blood finger prick, and then we can tell you how fast or slow you're aging. And then we've also got organ ages. These are all approximations. It's not perfect, but what we found in a preliminary study that we administered to about a dozen people aged late 30s to, I believe, 77 years old— it may have been 75, something in that range— males and females, half and half, that 73% of the people that were taking the NOVOSCORE product in the before-after test after 6 months, they reduced their biological age, and it was the equivalent of about 1 month per year in terms of a reduction in PACE.

27:44 And then those who didn't slow it down, so the remaining 27%, they didn't accelerate their aging either, which is critical. It implies at least the possibility that maybe we were protecting these people that would have accelerated their aging. Now this was a preliminary study, it wasn't placebo-controlled and so on, but it was a really nice peek into the potential behind this formula and it warrants further research. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming back on. Let's do a check-in and then we'll put this podcast out so you can launch everything related to the clinical trial. So it's gonna be posted up here in show notes when this thing's out. Launches, and I love the longevity, the perseverance, and, you know, younger for longer. So go Novos and go Halo. Good to see you. Thank you, Pete. This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks, your captain speaking. I am the founder and managing partner at Integrity Square. We've been around now for 15 and one half years. We have been helping people like yourselves get capital through mergers and acquisitions, consulting, strategic advice in the health, active lifestyle, and outdoor, Halo sector, trying to help as many entrepreneurs as possible get to the next level, take that inflection point to be the force behind your growth. We are helping companies that have at least $3

29:15 million of EBITDA, around $10 million of revenue, and we are positioned to help you get institutional growth capital or to negotiate deals with strategic partners. If you go to IntegritySQ.com/ISQ, you can see our capabilities deck. Happy to set up a consultation at any time. That is free of charge, and we look forward to helping solve obesity, loneliness, and diabetes. Go HEN.